GOVERNMENT GONE BAD

What is wrong with our government is not an easy question to answer. I was blessed at one time in my life to work as a professor in a newly formed college of veterinary medicine. What was not evident before I was hired was the founding dean and a newly hired faculty organized it in what I considered in a perfect way—they had organized the college to teach veterinary medicine. That statement my surprise people because of its simplicity. What else is a college organized to do? I see a parallel in that experience with the formation of the United States government; it was organized to govern. The obvious question is, why else would you organize a government if not to govern.

Compare these two efforts with the formation of a corporation. A corporation is formed to make a profit; logically why else would you form a corporation. How is forming a corporation different from forming a college or a government? The answer is easy; personal gain; teaching veterinary medicine is hard work. Professors who work hard but seldom are paid more money for doing a better job of teaching. The same is true for government; elected representatives are not paid more for doing a good job of governing. Both teachers and elected representatives may gain personal fame, or higher office. In our economic based society, there is no real equivalency between cold hard cash and personal fame. On the other hand, personal monetary gain for corporate executives is not only the objective of their existence but leads to personal fame. In the course of our humanization, we have allowed money to distort our innate values in devastating ways.

We, like all animals, in fact all biota, have an innate propensity for hierarchy dominance, peck-order, or what ever you want to call it. It is innate so is part of us; we have to learn to live with it. It is reflected in the recognition of variously define groups as well; biologically, socially, culturally, and politically. Historically, the basis for organization was simple as individual physical strength expanded to include group strength. From there we evolved an innate sense of morality, which introduced our modern era of individual behavior, which expanded to group behavior. There is still hierarchy in morality. If a strong man mistreats his weaker wife, which is physically possible and does happen, society as a group considers it morally wrong; hence, abates the tendency even if it exists.

In the college of veterinary medicine, the founding fathers happened to be dominated by basic scientist who formed a curriculum that started with two years of basic science followed by two years of clinics. With time and because of the nature of education, there were many more clinicians than there were basic scientists on the faulty. What was unusual about my experience in this “new” college was that certain other newly forming colleges never had this basic science orientation and moved directly in to the clinical dominance phase thus had nothing for immediate comparison as I had. In a democracy, clinicians exercised their voting strength and soon dominated the basic science faculty in such things as allocation of resources including faculty positions and teaching time as well as economic resources. The subject matter switched form a professional curriculum based on understand of how thing work to a clinical approach which is based on how to do things; a switch from professionalism to technical education; from leaning how to be a doctor to leaning how to be a nurse. What clinicians don’t seem to appreciate is that the profession had abandoned the apprenticeship approach to veterinary medical education years ago as a failure and learned that teaching basic science first gave a wide foundation for future or lifetime learning. Basic science cannot be learned by experience, technical skills can.

Compare this experience in education with the establishment of our government. Suppose all our founding fathers had corporate attitudes. In that case, there is no chance that our government would have been based on the idea of one-man one-vote. They may have formed a representative government but only corporations would be represented. Our founding fathers did something unique; they formed a government, which is still a form of organization related to hierarchy dominance; however, they formed a government controlled by the mass of followers and not an individual leader. It was not an easy thing to do and had many growing pains. In a sense, a government by the people is a violation of an innate biological precedence—tantamount to a wolf pack where the pack was the leader, which would seem anomalous to most of us. However, we have “learned” that one-man one-vote is the most desirable way to go. What we see happening in our government, is something we the people define as “government gone badly”; it is a transfer of power from “we the people” to “corporations” or the economic elite, which most of us do not like.

In our college, we had great success with basic scientists controlling the curriculum and were one of the best colleges of veterinary medicine in the country; in our country, we had great success with the people controlling government. We were one of the best colleges in the country and our country was one of the best, if not the best in the world. We chose to abandon the apprenticeship approach to professional education as a failure just as we chose to abandoned royalty or dictatorships as the best form of government. Now we seem to be going backwards; we will just have to relearn that what we are reverting to is bad as it was originally—an unnecessary tail chasing but what can we do, we are people.           

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