Bigger Than Science, Bigger Than Religion

Here we have an author trying to bridge a huge cultural chasm - the gulf between science and religion.  This kind of dialogue is sorely needed.

The Earth we depend on is caught up in an unprecedented storm of global scale challenges.  Science provides a window on our planet's natural systems, increasingly stressed by human demands, but too many Americans are in denial.

The tug of war between religion and scientific dogma is extremely destructive. For the sake of our children and generations yet to come, we have to make this right.

The essay below appeared in Yes Magazine, a wonderful resource for life-affirming, progressive inspiration.

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Bigger Than Science, Bigger Than Religion

Sunday, 01 March 2015 10:34 By Richard Schiffman, YES! Magazine | Op-Ed

 We're closer to environmental disaster than ever before. We need a new story for our relationship with the Earth, one that goes beyond science and religion.

The world as we know it is slipping away. At the current rate of destruction, tropical rainforest could be gone within as little as 40 years. The seas are being overfished to the point of exhaustion, and coral reefs are dying from ocean acidification. Biologists say that we are currently at the start of the largest mass extinction event since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. As greenhouse gases increasingly accumulate in the atmosphere, temperatures are likely to rise faster than our current ecological and agricultural systems can adapt.

It is no secret that the Earth is in trouble and that we humans are to blame. Just knowing these grim facts, however, won’t get us very far. We have to transform this knowledge into a deep passion to change course. But passion does not come primarily from the head; it is a product of the heart. And the heart is not aroused by the bare facts alone. It needs stories that weave those facts into a moving and meaningful narrative.

We need a powerful new story that we are a part of nature and not separate from it. We need a story that properly situates humans in the world—neither above it by virtue of our superior intellect, nor dwarfed by the universe into cosmic insignificance. We are equal partners with all that exists, co-creators with trees and galaxies and the microorganisms in our own gut, in a materially and spiritually evolving universe.

This was the breathtaking vision of the late Father Thomas Berry. Berry taught that humanity is presently at a critical decision point. Either we develop a more heart-full relationship with the Earth that sustains us, or we destroy ourselves and life on the planet. I interviewed the white-maned theologian (he preferred the term “geologian,” by which he meant “student of the Earth”) in 1997 at the Riverdale Center of Religious Research on the Hudson River north of New York City. Berry spoke slowly and with the hint of a southern drawl, revealing his North Carolina upbringing.

“I say that my generation has been autistic,” he told me. “An autistic child is locked into themselves, they cannot get out and the outer world cannot get in. They cannot receive affection, cannot give affection. And this is, I think, a very appropriate way of identifying this generation in its relationship to the natural world.

“We have no feeling for the natural world. We’d as soon cut down our most beautiful tree, the most beautiful forest in the world. We cut it down for what? For timber, for board feet. We don’t see the tree, we only see it in terms of its commercial value.”

It is no accident that we have come to our current crisis, according to Berry. Rather, it is the natural consequence of certain core cultural beliefs that comprise what Berry called “the Old Story.” At the heart of the Old Story is the idea that we humans are set apart from nature and here to conquer it. Berry cited the teaching in Genesis that humans should “subdue the Earth … and have dominion over every living thing.”

But if religion provided the outline for the story, science wrote it large—developing a mind-boggling mastery of the natural world. Indeed, science over time became the new religion, said Berry, an idolatrous worship of our own human prowess. Like true believers, many today are convinced that, however bad things might seem, science and technology will eventually solve all of our problems and fulfill all of our needs.

Berry acknowledged that this naive belief in science served a useful purpose during the formative era when we were still building the modern world and becoming aware of our immense power to transform things.

Like adolescents staking out their own place in the world, we asserted our independence from nature and the greater family of life. But over time, this self-assertion became unbalanced, pushing the Earth to the brink of environmental cataclysm. The time has come to leave this adolescent stage behind, said Berry, and develop a new, mature relationship with the Earth and its inhabitants.

We’ll need to approach this crucial transition on many different fronts. Scientific research has too frequently become the willing handmaiden of what Berry called “the extractive economy,” an economic system that treats our fellow creatures as objects to be exploited rather than as living beings with their own awareness and rights. Moreover, technology, in Berry’s view, potentially separates us from intimacy with life. We flee into “cyberspace”— spending more time on smart phones, iPods, and video games than communing with the real world.

Science and technology are not the problem. Our misuse of them is. Berry said that science needs to acknowledge that the universe is not a random assemblage of dead matter and empty space, but is alive, intelligent, and continually evolving. And it needs to recognize that not only is the world alive, it is alive in us. “We bear the universe in our beings,” Berry reflected, “as the universe bears us in its being.” In Berry’s view, our human lives are no accident. We are the eyes, the minds, and the hearts that the cosmos is evolving so that it can come to know itself ever more perfectly through us.

It’s a view that has been winning some surprising adherents. Several years ago, I had dinner with Edgar Mitchell, one of only a dozen humans who have walked upon the lunar surface. Mitchell, the descendant of New Mexico pioneers and an aeronautical engineer by training, spoke precisely and almost clinically—until he related an experience that happened on his way back to Earth during the Apollo 14 mission. At that point, his voice brightened with awe.

“I was gazing out of the window, at the Earth, moon, sun, and star-studded blackness of space in turn as our capsule slowly rotated,” he said. “Gradually, I was flooded with the ecstatic awareness that I was a part of what I was observing. Every molecule in my body was birthed in a star hanging in space. I became aware that everything that exists is part of one intricately interconnected whole.”

The Overview Effect

In a recent phone chat, Mitchell called this realization “the Overview Effect,” and he said that virtually all of the moon astronauts experienced it during their flights. In his case, it changed the direction of his life: “I realized that the story of ourselves as told by our scientific cosmology and our religion was incomplete and likely flawed. I saw that the Newtonian idea of separate, independent, discrete things in the universe wasn’t a fully accurate description.”

In pursuit of a holistic understanding, Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to explore the nature of human consciousness. The question of consciousness might seem remote from issues like climate change. But it is central to the question of how we treat the world. At the core of our abuse of nature is the belief that we humans are essentially islands unto ourselves, alienated from the world beyond our skins. A little god locked within the gated community of his or her own skull won’t feel much responsibility for what goes on outside.

“The classical scientific approach says that observation and consciousness are completely independent of the way the world works,” IONS Chief Scientist Dean Radin told me. But physics has known for decades that mind and matter are not as separable as we once supposed. Radin cites as an example Heisenberg’s discovery that the act of observation changes the phenomenon that is being observed.

Moreover, quantum physics has shown that subatomic particles that are separated in space are nevertheless responsive to one another in ways that are not yet fully understood. We are discovering that there is “some underlying form of connection in which literally everything is connected to everything else all of the time,” asserts Radin. “The universe is less a collection of objects than a web of interrelationships.”

As we come to grasp how inextricably embedded in this vast web of cosmic life we are, Radin hopes that humans will be persuaded to move beyond the idea of ourselves as masters and the world as slave to embrace an equal and mutually beneficial partnership.

Another prophet of a new scientific paradigm is renowned Harvard biologist Edward (E.O.) Wilson. Wilson is best known for his biophilia hypothesis, which says there is an instinctive emotional bond between humans and other life forms. Evolution has fostered in us the drive to love and care for other living beings, Wilson says, as a way to promote the survival not just of our own kind but of life as a whole.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is invoked to argue that we humans are conditioned by nature to struggle tooth and nail for access to limited resources. But Wilson contends that evolution does not just promote violent competition but also favors the development of compassion and cooperation—traits that serve the interests of the group as a whole.

He calls this radical new idea “group selection.” Groups of altruistically inclined individuals have an evolutionary advantage over groups that are composed of members pursuing only their own survival needs. This collective advantage, he argues, has helped to promote powerful social bonds and cooperative behaviors in species as diverse as ants, geese, elk, and human beings.

In championing the evolutionary importance of love and cooperation in the flourishing of life, Wilson is not just revolutionizing biology. He is also venturing into territory usually occupied by religion. But, like Berry, Wilson argues that we need a story that cuts across traditional boundaries between fields to present a new, integral vision. “Science and religion are two of the most potent forces on Earth,” Wilson asserts, “and they should come together to save the Creation.”

A thousand-year worldview

At its heart, the new story that Wilson and Berry advocate is actually a very old one. Indigenous spiritual traditions taught that all beings are our relatives long before the science of ecology “discovered” the seamless web of life that binds humans to other creatures. “The world is alive, everything has spirit, has standing, has the right to be recognized,” proclaims Anishinaabe activist and former Green Party candidate for vice president Winona LaDuke.

“One of our fundamental teachings is that in all our actions we consider the impact it will have on seven generations,” LaDuke told an audience at the University of Ottawa in 2012. “Think about what it would mean to have a worldview that could last a thousand years, instead of the current corporate mindset that can’t see beyond the next quarterly earnings statement.”

When LaDuke speaks of Native values, people sometimes ask her what relevance these have for us today. She answers that the respect for the sacredness of nature that inspired people to live in harmony with their environment for millennia is not a relic of the past. It is a roadmap for living lightly on the Earth that we desperately need in a time of climate change.

This ethic has spread beyond the reservation into religiously inspired communities, like Genesis Farm, founded by the Dominican Sisters of Caldwell, New Jersey. Set on ancestral Lenape lands amidst wooded hills and wetlands and within view of the Delaware Water Gap, Genesis has served for the last quarter century as an environmental learning center and working biodynamic farm grounded in Berry’s vision.

I spoke to the community’s founder Sister Miriam MacGillis, a friend and student of Berry, in a room studded with satellite images of the farm and its bioregion. MacGillis told me that she underwent decades of struggle trying to reconcile Berry’s 13-billion-year vision of an evolutionary cosmos with the ultimately incompatible biblical teachings that “creation is finished: Humans were made, history began, there was the fall, and history will end with the apocalypse.” She says, “The pictures I had of God were too small, too parochial, too much a reflection of the ways humans think. We made God in our image!”

Taking the long view fundamentally transforms the basis for environmental action, says MacGillis: “We need to realize that we are the universe in the form of the human. We are not just on Earth to do good ecological things. That is where the religious perspective takes us with the stewardship model—take care of it; it’s holy because God made it. That hasn’t worked real well … The idea of stewardship is too small, it’s too human-centered, like we can do that. It’s really the opposite. Earth is taking total care of us.”

Genesis Farm has propagated these ideas through its Earth Literacy training, which has now spread to many places throughout the world. Their work is a small part of a larger greening of religion, says Yale religious scholar Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-creator with Brian Swimme of Journey of the Universe, an exhilarating trek through time and space portraying an evolutionary universe.

Tucker expects that the upcoming encyclical on climate change and the environment that Pope Francis will issue in early 2015 will be “a game changer” for Catholics. She adds that Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has also been outspoken, labeling crimes against the natural world “a sin.” The Dalai Lama, for his part, has been speaking about the importance of safeguarding the environment based on Buddhism’s sense of the profound interdependence of all life. China has recently enshrined in its constitution the need for a new ecological civilization rooted in Confucian values, which preach the harmony between humans, Earth, and Heaven.

“All civilizations have drawn on the wisdom traditions that have gotten people through death, tragedy, destruction, immense despair,” says Tucker, adding that we are currently in a perilous rite of passage. “We will need all of the world’s religions to help as well as a shared sense of an evolutionary story to get us through this.”

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Richard Schiffman

Richard Schiffman is the author of two biographies as well as a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Huffington Post, and on NPR and Monitor Radio.

The Richest 1% Owns Everything

A report was just released by Oxfam International. It showed that a handful of people have managed to take control of more of the world's privately held wealth than the other 99% of us combined. They have given new definition to the word, greed. The vast majority of people who are not part of that small, self-absorbed cabal of obscene wealth are fed up. - EMPDX

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In less than two years, if current trends continued unchecked, the richest 1% percent of people on the planet will own at least half of the world's wealth.

That's the conclusion of a new report from Oxfam International, released Monday, which states that the rate of global inequality is not only morally obscene, but an existential threat to the economies of the world and the very survival of the planet. Alongside climate change, Oxfam says that spiraling disparity between the super-rich and everyone else, is brewing disaster for humanity as a whole.
"Do we really want to live in a world where the one percent own more than the rest of us combined?" asked Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International. "The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering and despite the issues shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast."

According to the report—titled Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More (pdf):

Global wealth is becoming increasing concentrated among a small wealthy elite. Data from Credit Suisse shows that since 2010, the richest 1% of adults in the world have been increasing their share of total global wealth . Figure 1 shows that 2010 marks an inflection point in the share of global wealth going to this group. Figure 1 : Share of global wealth of the top 1% and bottom 99% respectively ; Credit Suisse data available 2000 – 2014. In 2014 , the richest 1% of people in the world own ed 48% of global wealth , leaving just 52% to be shared between the other 99% of adults on the planet. 1 Almost all of th at 52% is owned by those included in the richest 20%, leaving just 5.5% for the remaining 80% of people in the world. If this trend continues of an increasing wealth share to the richest, the top 1% will have more wealth than the remaining 99% of people in just two years with the wealth share of the top 1% exceeding 50% by 2016.

The report also shows that even among the über-rich there remain divisions, with an outsized majority on the list of the world's wealthiest people hailing from the United States. And it's not an accident. The world's most wealthy, as the Oxfam report documents, spends enormous amounts of their money each year on lobbying efforts designed to defend the assets they have and expand their ability to make even more.

The world's wealthiest, reads the report, "have generated and sustained their vast riches through their interests and activities in a few important economic sectors, including finance and insurance and pharmaceuticals and healthcare. Companies from these sectors spend millions of dollars every year on lobbying to create a policy environment that protects and enhances their interests further. The most prolific lobbying activities in the US are on budget and tax issues; public resources that should be directed to benefit the whole population, rather than reflect the interests of powerful lobbyists."
Released on the eve of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam says that the world's financial and political elite can no longer ignore, and should no longer perpetuate, inequality at this scale.

"Our report is just the latest evidence that inequality has reached shocking extremes, and continues to grow," said Byanyima, who was invited to act as co-chair for this year's Davos summit. "It is time for the global leaders of modern capitalism, in addition to our politicians, to work to change the system to make it more inclusive, more equitable and more sustainable."

She continued, "Extreme inequality isn't just a moral wrong. It undermines economic growth and it threatens the private sector's bottom line.  All those gathering at Davos who want a stable and prosperous world should make tackling inequality a top priority."

Contained in the paper is a seven-point plan of specific proposals which Oxfam says must be added to the agenda of all world leaders:

1. Clamp down on tax dodging by corporations and rich individuals
2. Invest in universal, free public services such as health and education
3. Share the tax burden fairly, shifting taxation from labour and consumption towards    capital and wealth
4. Introduce minimum wages and move towards a living wage for all workers
5. Introduce equal pay legislation and promote economic policies to give women a fair deal
6. Ensure adequate safety-nets for the poorest, including a minimum income guarantee
7. Agree a global goal to tackle inequality.

On her role as co-chair at the WEF summit this week, Byanyima told the Guardian she was surprised to be invited, because Oxfam represents a "critical voice" to most of the others who attend. "We go there to challenge these powerful elites," she said. "It is an act of courage to invite me."

However, part of the message contained in the report is that economic inequality of this magnitude is not just threat to the poor and disadvantaged but also to those who have traditionally benefited from the model of pro-growth capitalism. As growing amounts of research have shown—most prominently in the work of French economist Thomas Piketty—the nearly unprecedented levels of inequality is hurting modern capitalism even on its own terms.

But just as these levels of inequality are the result of government policies that have benefited the rich, Oxfam believes that a change in such governing structures is the key to reversing the trend.
As Byanyima told the Guardian, "Extreme inequality is not just an accident or a natural rule of economics. It is the result of policies and with different policies it can be reduced. I am optimistic that there will be change."

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

My Message to the Billionaire Ruling Class

Hey, congratulations, rich guys. You’ve made more money than you could possibly ever spend. Most of you are content with that, but a few of you are not. Some of you, instead of using your money to do good deeds and champion genuine progress,  are way off in the opposite direction. By that I mean using your wealth and power to force your self-centered worldview on the rest of us.

The truth is most billionaires - in fact most people who have more than a million or two in assets - are not part of the political hardball being played by a small group of bankers, corporatists, and billionaire psychopaths who behave like greedy thugs.

Being rich is a wonderful thing for those who are grateful for their good fortune, and are willing to give high priority to the common good.  Wealth also offers those who are so blessed an opportunity to be leaders and heroes, who want a future for the Earth that is worthy of our species.

The Gates Foundation, in the name of Bill and Melinda Gates, and to a lesser extent Warren Buffet, has applied billions of dollars to some of the world’s most pressing problems.  But even Bill and Warren, with all the good that they do, are playing both ends against the middle.  Both are substantially invested in the continued massive consumption of coal and oil.  

Journalist Naomi Klein’s most recent book, This Changes Everything, exposes the dualistic thinking that certain high profile billionaires keep hidden behind their polished public images.  They may genuinely want clean skies and a healthy biosphere, but the record shows they are not willing to give up profitable revenue streams from investments that foster our continued dependence on dirty fossil energy.

Too many wealthy people are content to sit on the political sidelines and collect their fat profits, while the economic and culturally corrosive public policy promoted by the worst of their billionaire neighbors makes everybody that already has big money even more rich, even more separate and unequal from the rest of us.

In fact, the real political evil emerges from a very small number of wealthy people.   Almost all the worst offenders are old.  Almost all are politically conservative men, who very much believe in white power and privilege. They aggressively use their wealth and influence to buy politicians and manipulate the American political process, with the intent to maximize their personal interests. I don’t suppose there is much of anything that I or anyone else could say that could turn that small band of big money evildoers in a more benevolent direction. They are simply indifferent to the consequences of their pathological actions.

But there is hope for the vast majority of millionaires and billionaires, who are not hopelessly self-absorbed.  Here’s my message to those wealthy folks, who recognize that they are not immune to the consequences of all the unprecedented, deeply unsettling, global scale challenges humanity must deal with.  I’m talking about climate change and fossil fuel dependence. I’m talking about our reckless, abjectly corrupt, and massively dysfunctional political process.  I’m talking about the human-driven shredding of the biosphere, whose finite water and living resources are being overwhelmed by the demands of seven billion plus human beings. We have made an Earth-sized mess of things.  Humanity and nature are near a breaking point of unprecedented scale.  Every human being has an obligation to get serious about this. Whether you’re a billionaire or an indigenous person, terrified and brutalized by illegal loggers in your forest, you have a life-and-death stake in what happens to this planet. 

To all fundamentally good and decent Americans who happen to be rich, and also happen to be passive or indifferent to our broken political process, I say, time to wake up.  You might think you can escape the consequences of your inaction. Don’t count on it.   History has shown that when the privileged members of a society stand by passively and watch the masses sink, the rabble tend to rise up. They focus their rage and demands for retribution on people of privilege, reserving their greatest ire for those who have shown no compassion for their suffering.  I’m not just talking about the oppressors. I’m talking about those who turned a blind eye to the process of oppression.

In 1794, during the French Revolution, Antoine Lavoiser, who is remembered historically for his contributions to science, was guillotined because he made his living as a tax collector for the ruling class.  The same dynamic that resulted in Lavosier losing his head applies today. Being on the losing side of a life and death, cultural struggle can be a fatal mistake.

Getting on the morally correct, and very likely, the winning side of history, requires making yourself part of the solution.  It is not acceptable to sit by passively while a handful of bad billionaires use their wealth to ruin our environment and tear society apart in the name of profit. End of story.

Sordid Tales of Selfishness

I detest the 'I got mine, so fuck you' attitude reflected in self-absorbed, money-driven sociopathy.

Most people who have multi-million dollar bank accounts didn't get that way from being smarter, or working harder than everybody else. More than a few were born into good fortune. Some got rich from nurturing a great idea. The guys at Google come to mind. But, most of those people who have become part of the top one percent over the last forty or so years did it by being takers....ruthlessly determined to use every advantage to elevate themselves... stepping on anyone or anything in the way, without regard to consequences.

I want to be clear. Being rich doesn't make you evil. There are many wealthy people who are deeply compassionate, and are open in their concern for nature and their fellow human residents of Earth,  Having a big bank account is not a bad thing,  Unfortunately, too many, way too many of the one percenters  are all about themselves. They share a worldview characterized by callous indifference, even outright hostility to those they dismiss as the rabble.

The article below comes from the AlterNet website.  I feel sorry for the kind of people it describes.  Being selfish is not pretty. I'm not suggesting that taking nothing at all is a good example either. We are all born with the right to do as Spock espouses, 'To live long, and prosper'.  Being prosperous doesn't include the right to harm the biosphere and roll over other people.

I believe that joy comes to those who find ways to nurture and give back, when fortune smiles on them. You don't have to be religious to agree that 'it is better to give, than to receive'.

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Four Sordid Tales of Selfishness of the Super-Rich

 by Paul Buchheit          

 

AlterNet, November 16, 2014  |  

If the mainstream media made the effort to analyze and report the facts, the whole country would know about a level of selfishness that has spiraled out of control since the economists of the Reagan era convinced the wealthiest Americans that greed is good for everyone. Here are four extreme examples of that selfishness.

1. Ebola's Not Worth the Money If Only Africans Get Infected

World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Dr. Margaret Chan recently stated [3]: "Ebola emerged nearly four decades ago. Why are clinicians still empty-handed, with no vaccines and no cure? Because Ebola has historically been confined to poor African nations. The R&D incentive is virtually non-existent. A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay."

So we turn to philanthropy. But rich donors don't compensate for the flaws of capitalism. The Gates Foundation, among others, may appear noble and praiseworthy for all its charitable giving, but Dr. Chan noted [4] that "My budget [is] highly earmarked, so it is driven by what I call donor interests." Little of that 'earmarking' is toward diseases of the poor. A study in The Lancet [5] of medical products registered in 2000-11 revealed that "Only four new chemical entities were approved for neglected diseases (three for malaria, one for diarrhoeal disease), accounting for 1% of the 336 new chemical entities approved during the study period."

A related problem with philanthropy is summarized [6] by Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy: "Wealthy people tend to give to colleges, art museums, opera and hospitals very generously...Food banks depend more on lower income Americans."

The Chronicle of Philanthropy [7] confirmed that Americans with annual earnings under $100,000 increased their post-recession giving by 4.5 percent. Americans who earned over $200,000 reduced their giving by 4.6 percent over the same time period.

2. Going To Their Graves Without Paying What They Owe

Charles Koch, who is very much alive, said "I want my fair share - and that's all of it."

His dream is coming true. $30 trillion [8] has been taken since the recession [9], most of it financial gains [10], almost all of it [11] by the richest 1%, one-hundred thousand of whom made an estimated $18 million [12] each in three years, and most of whom are so rich that they can let their portfolios sit nearly tax-free until they die, at which point an almost non-existent estate tax ensures nearly tax-free [13] fortunes for their fortunate sons and daughters (only about one out of a thousand [14] estates are taxed).

Yet these are the people who benefit most from national security, infrastructure, tax laws, and patent and copyright laws. They're protected by police who stop and frisk and harass and arrest anyone who threatens the status quo of their wealthy society. But they don't want to pay for all the benefits, even after they're dead.

3. Inventing Rules That Take Money from the Poor

A collection of contrived laws and policies effectively transfer money from the middle class to the rulemakers:

---Capital Gains [15]: Pay less for just owning stocks

---Carried Interest [16]: The astonishing claim that hedge fund profits are not regular income

---Payroll Tax [17]: Multi-millionaires pay a tiny percentage compared to middle-income earners

---Roth IRAs [18]: A tax loophole [19] for the 20% of Americans who own 95 percent [20] of the financial wealth

---Derivatives [21]: Risky financial instruments are the first to be paid off in a bank collapse

---Bankruptcies [22]: Businesses can get out of debt, students can't

4. Treating Less Fortunate People As If They Don't Exist

Compelling research [23] by Paul Piff [24] and his colleagues has demonstrated that the accumulation of wealth leads to a sense of entitlement and qualities of narcissism. For example, rich people are more likely to flout traffic laws, to take items of value from others, and to cheat when necessary to win a prize or position.

At a higher level, irrefutable data [25] has been accumulated [26] to confirm [27] the relentless flow of money [28] away from our most vulnerable citizens:

Children: One out of every five American children lives in poverty [29], and for black children under the age of six it's nearly one out of TWO [30]. Almost half of food stamp recipients [31] are children. Worldwide, 76 million children [32] are living in poverty in the developed world, and hundreds of millions more in the developing world.

The Elderly: Three-quarters [33] of Americans approaching retirement in 2010 had an average of less than $30,000 [34] to support them in their retirement years.

The Homeless: According to The Nation [35], there are now more homeless people in New York City than at any time since the 1970s, and the number of homeless schoolchildren is at an all-time high.

The Sick and Disabled: Over 200 recent studies [36] have confirmed a link between financial stress and sickness. In just 20 years America's ranking among developed countries dropped [37] on nearly every major health measure.


Privileged people, oblivious to the realities beneath their lofty positions, talk about struggling Americans getting "comfortable" [38] in poverty, using food stamps to buy expensive food [38], and resting in the "hammock" [39] of the safety net. Perhaps delusion helps them to rationalize their selfishness. 

 

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/four-sordid-tales-selfishness-super-rich

Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/paul-buchheit
[3] http://www.who.int/dg/speeches/2014/regional-committee-africa/en/
[4] http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26861-privatized-ebola
[5] http://image.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X%2813%2970078-0/fulltext
[6] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wealthier-americans-give-less-than-poorer-people-2014-10-06
[7] http://philanthropy.com/article/As-Wealthy-Give-Smaller-Share/149191/
[8] http://www.usagainstgreed.org/20141103_Analysis.txt
[9] http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/infuriating-facts-about-our-disappearing-middle-class-wealth
[10] http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/ar/2012/PDFs/ar12_complete.pdf
[11] http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2011.pdf
[12] http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/grim-numbers-from-the-2014-global-wealth-report/18953-grim-numbers-from-the-2014-global-wealth-report
[13] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/10/01/guest-post-when-income-tax-cuts-masquerade-as-estate-tax-repeal/
[14] http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2014/10/30/estate-tax-exemption-for-2015-announced-by-irs/
[15] http://nationalpriorities.org/blog/2013/11/04/tax-break-hedge-fund-managers/
[16] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-anderson/yes-we-can-taxes_b_2505621.html
[17] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/11/16/1208701/democratic-senator-introduces-bill-to-lift-social-securitys-tax-cap-extend-its-solvency-for-decades/
[18] http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27418-the-roth-blunder-barrels-on
[19] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/10/opinion/la-oe-scorse-roth-iras-20110410
[20] http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
[21] http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/baliin.php
[22] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/09/11/3566194/senior-citizens-student-loan-debt-social-security/
[23] http://psp.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/08/19/0146167213501699.full#aff-1
[24] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.full.pdf
[25] http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-facts-about-how-america-rigged-massive-wealth-transfer-rich
[26] http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/the-billion-dollar-a-month-club-a-runaway-transfer-of-wealth-to-the-super-rich
[27] http://www.nationofchange.org/2014/10/27/grim-numbers-2014-global-wealth-report/
[28] http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/10/13/why-we-should-be-seething-anger-over-inequality
[29] http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acsbr10-05.pdf
[30] http://stateofworkingamerica.org/fact-sheets/poverty/
[31] http://blogs.usda.gov/2011/06/24/fact-vs-fiction-usda%E2%80%99s-supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program/
[32] http://www.unicef-irc.org/article/1069/
[33] http://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/guaranteeing-retirement-income/528-retirement-account-balances-by-income-even-the-highest-earners-dont-have-enough.html
[34] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/opinion/sunday/our-ridiculous-approach-to-retirement.html?_r=1&
[35] http://www.thenation.com/article/177032/gops-poverty-denialism#
[36] http://www.pfeef.org/research/Financial-Wellness-and-Health-Care-Costs.pdf
[37] http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/07/10/2279851/us-mediocre-health/
[38] http://www.thenation.com/article/177032/gops-poverty-denialism
[39] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/07/opinion/krugman-the-hammock-fallacy.html
[40] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Four Sordid Tales of Selfishness of the Super-Rich
[41] http://www.alternet.org/tags/selfishness
[42] http://www.alternet.org/tags/greed
[43] http://www.alternet.org/tags/income-inequality-0
[44] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B



 

Shaqtin' a Fool Meets Congress

I am constantly amazed by the dysfunctional swirl of arrogance and ignorance we know as the U.S. House of Representatives.   Not all of them. But out of 435 elected members,  the majority in this term are Republicans., and the majority of Republicans in the House are tea party types,  who all seem to be arrogant, ignorant, and sociopathic to a radical extreme.    No one should be surprised given this reality that our government is suffering a colossal case of brain freeze.

My favorite spectator sport is NBA basketball.  I watch 'Inside the NBA'  on TNT religiously during the season.  I get a kick out of watching Ernie, Kenny, and Charles.  It got even better when 'The Big Aristotle', Shaquille O'Neal joined the crew.  Shaq is 7' plus tall and around 300 lbs.  Remarkably, his  personality is as big as the oversized custom suits he wears.  Since Shaq came aboard, a regular feature of the broadcast has been a segment called,  Shaqtin' a Fool .   It's a series of video clips of NBA players being clumsy, funny, or foolish.  It's hilarious stuff, especially when narrated by Shaq Diesel himself.    

Here's what I'm wishing. I wish there was a  Shaqtin' a Fool  for congress.   Every day,  members of this very important part of our elected government say and do some of the stupidest things imaginable.  Some members have achieved superstar status in the art of contemptible foolishness and stupidity. Members of this club of big league jerks include Congressman Michelle Bachman,  Congressmen Louie Gohmert,  Congressman Steve King,  Congressman Trent Franks, Senator Ted Cruz, and Senator James Imhoff.   There are a whole lot more in the halls of congress that regularly have the kind of odious brain farts that warrant public ridicule.  

My latest nomination for congressional fool is Texas Republican Representative Michael Burgess.  Here's a guy, who happens to be a medical doctor, an ob-gyn no less - who claims that 15 week old fetus's masturbate while passing time in the uterus.  Burgess, a teaparty anti-abortion extremist, says that this womb wanking is evidence that a fetus is a real person.   Never mind that there is no scientific evidence that suggests that fetus's are doing any such thing.

It's a disgrace that our political system, seriously corrupted as it is, enables the election of ideological numbskulls like Michael Burgess.   It's no wonder our government is dysfunctional. As long as we keep electing arrogant boneheads to high political office, we as a nation, will get what we deserve.



 

Greedy Lying Bastards

Some title, Huh? This is a new feature length documentary film about climate deniers.  We're talking about a bunch of sorry sociopathic liars who have sold their souls to the Koch Brothers, Exxon Mobil and other individuals and corporations, who are wedded pathologically to the obscene profits they make from society's dependence on coal, oil, and natural gas.

This kind of 'in your face' media effort is critical to getting the public to pay attention. Climate change is the most profound challenge we face as a global civilization.  The science on climate change is irrefutable. Virtually every serious climate scientist in the world - thousands of them - are all on the same page on this issue.  Climate change is real. The science behind it is well understood and not complicated.  That's a fact.  Those who continue to muddy the waters, do so at the behest of a cabal of morally bankrupt, profit driven capitalists,  who could care less about the consequences of their nefarious actions.

Congratulations to Daryl Hannah and Craig Scott Rosebraugh for this marvelous work called, Greedy Lying Bastards.


Here is a link to the website for the film. It includes a very compelling trailer   http://greedylyingbastards.com/

Billionaire's Long Game

Just read an excellent piece by UC Berkeley economist Robert Reich. He was the Labor Department boss under Clinton.

In the piece pasted in below, Reich is reporting on a handful of superich guys, who also happen to be seriously sociopathic.   Guys like the Koch Brothers,  Sheldon Adelson, and Donald Trump make all wealthy people look bad. I would guess that more than 90% of all people earning over $250,000 annually are good souls. They are not selfish to the point of sociopathy.  Sadly for those many good souls with big bucks, it only takes a few billionaire bad apples to piss away the good name of all those folks who have the good fortune to be rich.

Why do some people who already have billions push so aggressively to screw those less fortunate?  I have a theory. First, who are we talking about? Nearly all of these sorry assholes are old, and they are mostly old white guys.  They've turned possession of the most money into a game. Having more than everybody else - and I mean everyone else...can't let some other billionaire asshole have more than you - having the most money makes you 'king of the hill'.  Psychologically, it means you have the biggest dick.  That's what it really comes down to with this very small club of billionaire jerks who are doing their damnedest to take down the middle class.

I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here. Bill Gates, George Soros, and Warren Buffet are billionaires. They are also, by and large, very good souls. There are many other rich folks, the vast majority I'm guessing,  who are mostly good people.  Unfortunately, too many of those mostly good rich folks are quietly staying in the shadows, trying to keep clear of the shitstorm being stirred up by their sociopathic brethren.  I have a bit of advice for those among the wealthy who are sitting on their hands. If they don't want any shit to get on them, it might be wise to throw in with the people who are in firm control of all the moral high ground.  Clue: it's not the side led by the Koch Brothers.

Check out the following piece by Robet Reich.



The Billionaires' Long Game

Posted: 12/12/2012 11:59 am

by Robert Reich

Clipped from the Huffington Post

 

I keep hearing that the billionaires and big corporations that poured all that money into the 2012 election learned their lesson. They lost their shirts and won't do it again.

Don't believe that for an instant.

It's true their political investments didn't exactly pay off this time around.

"Right now there is stunned disbelief that Republicans fared so poorly after all the money they invested," said Brent Bozell, president of For America, an Alexandria-based nonprofit that advocates for Christian values in politics.

"Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle," Donald Trump tweeted. "Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money."

Rove's two giant political funds -- American Crossroads (a Super PAC) and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (a so-called nonprofit "social welfare organization" that doesn't have to report its donors) -- backed Mitt Romney with $127 million spent on more than 82,000 television spots. Rove's groups spent another $51 million on House and Senate races. Ten of the 12 Senate candidates they supported lost.

The return on investment for American Crossroads donors turned out to be just 1 percent, according to any analysis by theSunlight Foundation, a Washington-based group that advocates for open government.

Among Rove's investors was Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire who owns the Las Vegas Sands Corporation.

Adelson invested more than $100 million in the election, mostly on Republicans who lost -- including $20 million that went to Romney's super PAC "Restore Our Future," $15 million to another super PAC that almost single-handedly kept Newt Gingrich's Republican primary campaign going and about $50 million to nonprofit Republican fronts such as Rove's Crossroads GPS.

Adelson wasn't alone, of course. Texas industrialist Harold Simmons invested $26.9 million; Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts invested close to $13 million; a network organized by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch invested $400 million.

But if you think these losses mean the end of high-stakes political investing, you don't know how these people work.

You see, if and when they eventually win, these billionaires will clean up. Their taxes will plummet, many of laws constraining their profits (such environmental laws preventing the Koch brothers from more depredations, and the anti-bribery Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that Adelson is being investigated for violating) will disappear, and what's left of labor unions will no longer intrude on their bottom lines.

And they have enough dough to keep betting until they eventually win. That's what it means to be a billionaire political investor: You're able to keep playing the odds until you get the golden ring.
Looking ahead, Adelson tells the Wall Street Journal he's ready to double his 2012 investment next time around. "I happen to be in a unique business where winning and losing is the basis of the entire business," he says, "so I don't cry when I lose. There's always a new hand coming up." He isn't looking back at his losses. "I know in the long run we're going to win."

Exactly. Adelson, Simmons, the Koch brothers and other billionaires will keep pouring in as much money as it takes to eventually win -- unless they're stopped. And procurers like Karl Rove will make sure they're at the gaming table.

Relative to their net worth, the billionaire investors have been playing for a pittance. Forbes magazine estimates Adelson's net worth at $21.5 billion. His Las Vegas Sands Corporation just approved a special dividend paying him about $1.2 billion this year, ahead of any possible tax increases that might emerge from congressional budget negotiations.

In the meantime, he and other billionaire political investors are profiting from their reputations as high-stakes players.

Adelson says he has many friends in Washington, "but the reasons aren't my good looks and charm. It's my pocket personality," referring to his political investments. And his determination to keep playing the odds ensures his Washington friends will continue to pay attention.

POLITICO reports Adelson recently met with three GOP governors said to be eying the 2016 presidential race.

This week he met separately with House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (the Adelsons invested $10 million in super PACs affiliated with Boehner and Cantor),possibly to discuss changes to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

As income and wealth become ever more concentrated in America, the nation's billionaire political investors will invest even more.

A record $6 billion was spent on the 2012 campaign, and outside groups poured $1.3 billion into political races, according to data from the Federal Election Commission and the Center for Responsive Politics.

That's why Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission has to be reversed -- either by a Supreme Court that becomes aware of the poison it's unleashed into our democracy, or by constitutional amendment.

It's also why we need full disclosure of who contributes what to whom.

And public financing that matches public money to contributions from small donors.

Most fundamentally, it's why America's widening inequality must be reversed.

ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage," now available in paperback. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

Careerists

Here is a piece written by Chris Hedges that resonates powerfully with me.  He writes about the bureaucrats, the faceless enablers who work in the trenches, turning corporate policy and government regulation into action or inaction that shapes our economy and our culture.  Hedges reflects on how too many of these nameless enablers remain silent or turn the other cheek, when faced with gross neglect, immorality, or malfeasance.   

Too often, such people fail when conflicted between self-interest and the greater good.  I submit that the solution is to prosecute criminal behavior. Not an easy task when so often the signals from our government suggest that bad behavior of the white collar kind will be tolerated by society.



The Careerists
by Chris Hedges

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

illustration by Mr. Fish

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They were the ones who kept the trains running. They filled out the forms and presided over the property confiscations. They rationed the food while children starved. They manufactured the guns. They ran the prisons. They enforced travel bans, confiscated passports, seized bank accounts and carried out segregation. They enforced the law. They did their jobs.

Political and military careerists, backed by war profiteers, have led us into useless wars, including World War I, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And millions followed them. Duty. Honor. Country. Carnivals of death. They sacrifice us all. In the futile battles of Verdun and the Somme in World War I, 1.8 million on both sides were killed, wounded or never found. In July of 1917 British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, despite the seas of dead, doomed even more in the mud of Passchendaele. By November, when it was clear his promised breakthrough at Passchendaele had failed, he jettisoned the initial goal—as we did in Iraq when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and in Afghanistan when al-Qaida left the country—and opted for a simple war of attrition. Haig “won” if more Germans than allied troops died. Death as score card. Passchendaele took 600,000 more lives on both sides of the line before it ended. It is not a new story. Generals are almost always buffoons. Soldiers followed John the Blind, who had lost his eyesight a decade earlier, to resounding defeat at the Battle of Crécy in 1337 during the Hundred Years War. We discover that leaders are mediocrities only when it is too late.

David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister during the Passchendaele campaign, wrote in his memoirs: “[Before the battle of Passchendaele] the Tanks Corps Staff prepared maps to show how a bombardment which obliterated the drainage would inevitably lead to a series of pools, and they located the exact spots where the waters would gather. The only reply was a peremptory order that they were to ‘Send no more of these ridiculous maps.’ Maps must conform to plans and not plans to maps. Facts that interfered with plans were impertinencies.”

Here you have the explanation of why our ruling elites do nothing about climate change, refuse to respond rationally to economic meltdown and are incapable of coping with the collapse of globalization and empire. These are circumstances that interfere with the very viability and sustainability of the system. And bureaucrats know only how to serve the system. They know only the managerial skills they ingested at West Point or Harvard Business School. They cannot think on their own. They cannot challenge assumptions or structures. They cannot intellectually or emotionally recognize that the system might implode. And so they do what Napoleon warned was the worst mistake a general could make—paint an imaginary picture of a situation and accept it as real. But we blithely ignore reality along with them. The mania for a happy ending blinds us. We do not want to believe what we see. It is too depressing. So we all retreat into collective self-delusion.

In Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary film “Shoah,” on the Holocaust, he interviews Filip Müller, a Czech Jew who survived the liquidations in Auschwitz as a member of the “special detail.” Müller relates this story:

“One day in 1943 when I was already in Crematorium 5, a train from Bialystok arrived. A prisoner on the ‘special detail’ saw a woman in the ‘undressing room’ who was the wife of a friend of his. He came right out and told her: ‘You are going to be exterminated. In three hours you’ll be ashes.’ The woman believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and warned to the other women. ‘We’re going to be killed. We’re going to be gassed.’ Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders didn’t want to hear that. They decided the woman was crazy. They chased her away. So she went to the men. To no avail. Not that they didn’t believe her. They’d heard rumors in the Bialystok ghetto, or in Grodno, and elsewhere. But who wanted to hear that? When she saw that no one would listen, she scratched her whole face. Out of despair. In shock. And she started to scream.”

Blaise Pascal wrote in “Pensées,” “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”

Hannah Arendt, in writing “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” noted that Adolf Eichmann was primarily motivated by “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.” He joined the Nazi Party because it was a good career move. “The trouble with Eichmann,” she wrote, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Arendt wrote. “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

Gitta Sereny makes the same point in her book “Into That Darkness,” about Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. The assignment to the SS was a promotion for the Austrian policeman. Stangl was not a sadist. He was soft-spoken and polite. He loved his wife and children very much. Unlike most Nazi camp officers, he did not take Jewish women as concubines. He was efficient and highly organized. He took pride in having received an official commendation as the “best camp commander in Poland.” Prisoners were simply objects. Goods. “That was my profession,” he said. “I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won’t deny it.” When Sereny asked Stangl how as a father he could kill children, he answered that he “rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. … [T]hey were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. …” He later told Sereny that when he read about lemmings it reminded him of Treblinka.

Christopher Browning’s collection of essays, “The Path to Genocide,” notes that it was the “moderate,” “normal” bureaucrats, not the zealots, who made the Holocaust possible. Germaine Tillion pointed out “the tragic easiness [during the Holocaust] with which ‘decent’ people could become the most callous executioners without seeming to notice what was happening to them.” The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.”

“The most nauseating type of S.S. were to me personally the cynics who no longer genuinely believed in their cause, but went on collecting blood guilt for its own sake,” wrote Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner in “Prisoners of Fear,” her searing memoir of Auschwitz. “Those cynics were not always brutal to the prisoners, their behavior changed with their mood. They took nothing seriously—neither themselves nor their cause, neither us nor our situation. One of the worst among them was Dr. Mengele, the Camp Doctor I have mentioned before. When a batch of newly arrived Jews was being classified into those fit for work and those fit for death, he would whistle a melody and rhythmically jerk his thumb over his right or his left shoulder—which meant ‘gas’ or ‘work.’ He thought conditions in the camp rotten, and even did a few things to improve them, but at the same time he committed murder callously, without any qualms.”

These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.

© 2012 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

more Chris Hedges

The Wisdom of Psychopaths

This book will not be published until October, 2012. I just read about it in Scientific American.  The author, a psychologist named Kevin Dutton, suggests "there is a fine line between a brilliant surgeon who lacks empathy and a Hannibal Lecter who kills for pleasure."

Dutton says, "our society as a whole is more psychopathic than ever: Psychopaths tend to be fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless, and focused—qualities tailor-made for success in the twenty-first century."

I would extend those characteristics to sociopaths as well.  We're talking about self-absorbed indivduals, who are indifferent to the consequences of their actions as they relate to others. The difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is measured in substile shades of gray. There are a whole lot of sociopaths in public life these days, starting with politicians, who treat 'of, by, and for the people', as a concept that applies only to those people who can buy the public policy they want.

There are a lot of famous faces that  fit Dutton's unsavory profile. Take Mitt Romney for instance, the 2012 Republican candidate for President of the United States. He may not be charismatic and he may not be fearless, but you certainly would have to call him ruthless and focused. He made hundreds of millions of dollars as a corporate raider, buying American businesses, stripping them of assets, then dumping their American workers in favor of the sweatshop wage, off-shore alternative.  Romney turned his corporate buy outs from profitable businesses into hollowed-out shells,  then walked away with tens of millions of dollars in plunder. As a Presidential candidate, Romney has proven, time and again, to be willing to say or do anything to advantage his position.  His presidential candidacy is more about unbridled ambition than anything else.

So many people in public life exhibit the characteristics of the psychopath. The 'wolf in sheep's clothing' is a metaphor for this kind of person.   We would all be well served by elevating our awareness so we recognize and are wary of people like this when they appear as public figures.  Perhaps Kevin Dutton's upcoming book,  The Wisdom of Psychopaths, will help in that regard. If so, it should be a welcome addition on our bookshelves.