Human cost of arrogant state economic meddling heads higher

By David McElroy · August 23, 2011

When I was walking Lucy this morning, I came across something I’m seeing more often these days. On a street just around the corner from me, a man from the city water utility was at a house to turn the water off. He shut off the meter and left a bright red disconnect tag fluttering on the front doorknob for all the world to see.

People have had money problems ever since there were people and money. Even in good economic times, some people struggle and have trouble paying their bills. With some, it’s a moral failing. With others, there are psychological issues at work. But I’m seeing more people today whose lives are being slammed by the economy who don’t fit the traditional categories. These are people who’ve worked hard and planned their lives, following the advice that responsible people gave about how to make it in the world.

It turns out that much of that advice means nothing today, because nothing seems to work today in the ways “the experts” had expected.

On the street where I live, I’ve never seen so many houses for sale. There are probably half a dozen “for sale” signs up — including the one above for a townhouse right across the street from me — and several more that are empty, but whose owners have given up on trying to sell for now. People are losing homes, cars, utilities and even families to the downturn.

In the news coverage and political discussion of the situation, we keep hearing people talk about what to do about the problem. It’s less often that we hear anyone have even a flicker of understanding of why the economic crash is happening. Because people don’t understand what happened and why, they’re foolishly counting on the same people and the same thinking that caused the problem to somehow fix the problem.

People are angry and hurting, whether they’ve lost a house or family or just the water until they can come up with $100. Some of them want to blame Barack Obama. Others want to blame various Republicans. Some want to blame Wall Street bankers or “the corporations” or gay marriage or the Illuminati or something. Many seem to want to do anything other than acknowledge that it’s the systematic manipulation of the economy for the last hundred years or so.

The truth is that our system is broken. It’s not just a matter of the current president or the previous president or which way the planets were lined up when you were born. Ideas have consequences. The ideas that have been at the heart of the economic manipulation of the last hundred years have been horrendously bad ideas that could only lead to where we are. Things can only get worse in the long run — until those ideas are stripped away like someone taking a boot off the neck of the free market.

People are hurting and need help. Even though they don’t understand it yet — and their masters at the machinery of the state don’t understand it yet — they need to be left alone to fix their own problems in peace and voluntary co-operation.

Until that happens, there’s much more pain where this came from. And that hurts me to watch.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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