The U.S. Senate approval this week has been of perhaps the most heinous bill ever, stealing from the poor to feed the rich on a scale and with an “in your face” credulity never quite seen before. If the House rejects it, it will only be because it is not heinous enough.
Almost all the talk about what the Democrats need to do to turn this horrid situation around seems to focus on mechanical fixes, putting more policies here and there to attract key demographics while continuing to badger the loyal base of the party with pitches for $5 donations.
With no disrespect and indeed praise for what Democratic leaders are trying to do to blunt the worst of MAGAt damage to all but the wealthy, the core matter, to my mind, continues to be missed.
I have often referred to the question, “what has happened? or what accounts for this?” to the period between two iconic speeches that defined the zeitgeist of the nation in the post-World War 2 period.
The first was on August 28, 1963. It was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 at the March on Washington rally. In that powerful testament to the striving for the virtues of human equality, he intoned, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The second speech was delivered in 1987 in a wildly popular movie, “Wall Street,” by the infamous character known as Gordon Gecco, who intones the phrase “Greed is good!” Greed, he declared, “captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”
It was in the 24 years between “I have a dream” and “Greed is good” that something very fundamental occurred, a paradigm shift in the national spirit that has carried forward, minus a countervailing interruption when Obama was elected, to the present day, giving us Trump and the MAGAts.
A downward spiral from the mountain top to the gutter, that 24 year stretch has been seminal. In a frantic offensive, the dictators of our culture squashed the morally-driven civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s with an anti-moral fixation on personal hedonistic obsession, peaking in the worst of what became known as the “Me Decade” of the 1970s.
The MAGAt cult of today owes its origin to that period. Massive investment of America’s counterinsurgent efforts were put toward the development of anti-social cults which demonstrated the same kind of mind-bending content as the MAGAts have displayed for the last decade. The essence of cult behavior is a disregard for the truth in favor of whatever a cult leader claims is a better reality. The products of science, a media reporting on facts, and a public that shares these priorities, were the enemies of the proliferation of the countless cults that nurtured during that 24 year period between 1963 and 1987.
What was at the heart of the shift in that era? Captain G.M. Gilbert, an Army psychologist assigned to watch Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials between 1945 and 1949, wrote this: “In my work with the defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil, and I now think I have come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Yes, the common denominator of all the cults and hedonistic obsessions of the 1970s, including the politicization of Christian fundamentalists, involved a purging of empathy among their followers.
Lying is a behavior that requires a lack of empathy. As a cult asserts its particular version of truth against a scientifically or empirically-grounded one, it is done in the context of a lack of caring for those not sharing the cult viewpoint. This creates a mentality of the cult against the world, and the world, if it is not converted, be damned.
The lack of empathy, or love, is to blame.
