Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are always bad men.
Lord Acton
Seldom has anyone uttered a truer phrase, and if you believe it, it actually helps you to navigate the maze of politics.
For example: health care. If my government is truly powerful (and it is), do I want this powerful government (i.e., these powerful men) to take over control of my health care?
Absolutely not! My health care decisions are personal decisions, and I would far rather be unable to afford a doctor at all than have any government dictate those decisions to me – or even know the full state of my health or lack of it. Bluntly, that’s nobody’s business but my own – and it never will be. Government health care would simply mean that I could never again visit a health care professional in this country without having my privacy violated. And my privacy is important enough to me that this means that I could never again receive health care within the borders of the United States.
Actually, that’s not such a large problem for me personally. After my last doctor tried to kill me a few years ago, I’ve stuck with nutritional supplements and haven’t seen another MD. I don’t think very highly of the profession. If those supplements that keep me healthy are banned by an out-of-control government, I’ll be moving to Mexico in short order where I can get anything I could ever want over the counter for cash with zero record of the transaction. Dead simple.
But power corrupts should be remembered in other ways, too. I recently read Seymour Hersh’s remarks about Cheney operating an assassination program out of the White House. This shouldn’t surprise any student of human nature who actually watched Cheney, as he is a walking advertisement for clinical sadism and power corrupts. My conservative friends (all two of them) tell me defensively that this program was just great. It “kept us safe” from Al Qaeda (a CIA invention, anyway). They should remember instead that because power corrupts, it is no stretch at all from offing a jihadist here and there to offing your political rivals. My friends need to remember that forgetting that universal principle is not a survival characteristic.
So now it appears that Obama is pursuing many of these programs himself. I have to admit that makes me smile a bit when I think about my conservative buddies. Anything that increases the power of government will be abused eventually. We see this in action every single day, and now it’s their turn to sweat about it.
Why is this so difficult for Americans to understand? Because, by comparison with the rest of the world, our government did seem reasonably benign for many generations – or at least, it managed to fool us into thinking so. But no government is ever truly benign. Ever. Some are just better at secrecy than others.
Power corrupts! If you give any organization, public or private, power over your life, that power will, sooner or later, be abused. There are no exceptions.
The only possible way to slow this process (and you cannot stop it until you abolish government altogether) is to hold government to as nearly universal human moral standards as possible. The Christians think they have the only morality that is valid, but they are deluded. Hell, they can’t even define “adultery,” let alone the difference between “kill” and “murder.”
We need to look for points of agreement among pretty much all of us. We do nearly all agree that murder is wrong, so why do we allow our government to do it?
Don’t look at me! I haven’t got a clue. I personally believe that anyone who gave the order for an assassination right down to the poor bastard that pulled the trigger should be subject to immediate trial, and if convicted of murder, subject to the death penalty also. War is a little different if it is unavoidable, but war in anything other than self defense is murder also. Make no mistake about that.
We pretty much all agree that torture is wrong. Not only is it wrong morally, it is just plain stupid, because the victim of torture will tell you all kinds of lies to get the torture to stop. Torture is only good for one thing – getting folks to tell you what you want or need to hear. Like maybe getting Al Qaeda folks to confess to 9/11 when it was an inside job? I have that dirty suspicion, yes. What about you? Cheney is certainly capable of it. I suspect he actually enjoyed ordering torture and watching it. So why is it difficult to imagine those as his underlying reasons?
Until we get over our national reluctance to talk about basic morality in anything other than the framework of fanatical religion – which many of us reject out of hand – we’re going to have a government that is immoral and dangerous to all of us.
It might do every one of us good to remember the last successful anarchist society – the American “Old West.” Contrary to history’s lies and Hollywood fiction, blood did not run in the streets. There were only a few dozen high noon type gunfights on this continent over a span of a hundred years, and collateral damage was slight. Most folks never came within 1,000 miles of such a fight in their lifetimes. But no one ever questioned the carriage of arms, openly or concealed, and a woman could walk the streets at night without fear of kidnap or rape.
It was also the most generally prosperous society in history.
Would that really be so awful?
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This post was written by Kate on November 24, 2009
