The subject of welfare comes up so often and in so many different
ways, it made me wonder if there was something fundamental, innate, or even personal
about it. I remember my mother saying something along the lines of poverty is something
that should be ameliorated while my father was more prone to say if they would
get up off there back-sides and go to work they wouldn’t need help from me. The
strange thing about the question was they never seemed to debate the issue; one
believed one way and the other the other way, which is a sure sign they both
believed each other’s positions had merit.
Because of humanization, we are no longer capable of reverting to survival of the fittest on such a bestial level; however, some of us seem ready to accept that if they cannot survive that is their problem. I look at #Ayn Rand in that light; the classic picture of an orphaned baby elephant seal looking for a mother until it dies of starvation. The audience viewing that film gasped in horror at the sight; the meeting of bestiality with humanization.
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Over the past 50 or so years, I gathered from listening to political
debate that political positions in respect to poverty started to include a
moral element, which means to me that people were starting to look for reasons
to justify their position. Poverty is as old as humankind itself is. From a biological
point of view, it seems poverty is a multifaceted variable associated with survival;
the resulting sum of physical as well as mental attributes. The fastest runner,
the one with the best eyesight, or the one who can figure out how to catch two
fish as opposed to one is the winner—or in Darwinian terms, the survivor. With
the addition of morality to the mix, our more advanced and sophisticated
society has implies to be a slow runner or have bad eyesight or not being able
to catch more fish is morally inferior—and by extension to be poor is to be
inferior, which is the ugliness of social Darwinism laid bare. If the poor are unfit,
they cannot and should survive. Worst yet, use them to survive, in other words
the superior should kill the inferior, as in war; take their territory, their resources,
or anything else that would help them to be superior.
Because of humanization, we are no longer capable of reverting to survival of the fittest on such a bestial level; however, some of us seem ready to accept that if they cannot survive that is their problem. I look at #Ayn Rand in that light; the classic picture of an orphaned baby elephant seal looking for a mother until it dies of starvation. The audience viewing that film gasped in horror at the sight; the meeting of bestiality with humanization.
I think about Paul Ryan, and people like him, looking at the
human poverty, and gasp in horror at he positions he is taking. I learned much
from a book written by #George Lakoff, a person who bills himself as a cognitive
linquist—I have to admit I do not know what that title means. Nonetheless, the 1996
book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives
Think, has explanatory merit. He used the family as a model for society as
a whole; if a family has a child that is misbehaving, it is morally wrong for
the father not to punish that child. The child will grow up to be an irresponsible
adult. Paul Ryan clearly sees poverty in
that light. If you do not punish people in poverty, they will stay poor. He
clearly sees himself as being morally correct in cutting all welfare; it is the moral thing to do. Of course,
he couches his rhetoric in different terms. He goes to great lengths not say he
wants to punish poor people, which would reveal his lack of compassion. He
would say he wants to help people just as a father wants his child to grow up
and be a good person; he is looking for accolades for what he is doing. He sees himself as a father figure, a compassionate
conservative, as George W. Bash believed he was going to do if he could eliminate
Social Security; if old people lived in poverty, it would somehow be morally
correct.
The broad sweep of welfare cuts does not bother persons like
Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, or Ayn Rand who has the “righteous” philosophy of “spare
the rod spoil the child”. Even if the child is not responsible for what the
father thinks he of she is responsible for, because the “good intentions” will eventually
contribute to making him or her into a better person. Of course, liberals know
that beating a child will not turn “them” into good runners, or give them
better eyesight, or make the more intelligent, still liberals know there are
those who deserve punishment; the problem is in knowing which ones. In most
cases, we know how to find out, for example drug testing for welfare recipients,
or State ID for voters, or driving license and a long list of etceteras: however, we usually are too compassionate to
accept the punishment. Who among us are content with the idea of letting a
person starve on the streets if they are drug or alcohol addicts or cheat on
social security, or have a marginally low IQ. Who is willing to let the elephant
seal pup die because it could not find a mother?
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