Gene's Blog

About government

Okay, so what I am going to do here is excerpt from Book 2 somethings God has to say about government. Then, talk a bit about them from my own perspective. Fair warning – this will be a little long. :^)

To begin with this comes from chapter 10 in Book 2 of the CWG series when Neale asks God if it is wrong for countries to conduct foreign policy based on our own vested interests. I am making an assumption here, which may well be incorrect, as to why Neale raises this question, remembering this book was written in 1997, and memory of the Nixon years, where the United States, under the guidance of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, actively promoted governments around the world that were the antithesis of American democracy, right wing dictators, enormous human rights violations, with money, weaponry and on-the-ground advice from CIA operatives. Governments, who did things to their own citizens, that we, in my opinion, should have fought to the death to prevent. We, the United States of America, sold our own soul, to oppose that which we deemed a greater evil, communism. I am not a believer in the common idea that the end justifies the means. At all. Ever. For to me it is what we do and how we do it that matters most, if we forget that, if we deviate from that for whatever “lofty” purpose then we become that which we abhor. And that we became through the amoral tutelage and guidance of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. This continued through the Reagan years, though he is credited with bringing down Soviet Russia, in truth that system collapsed of its own accord and the enlightened leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the few real statesmen of the second half of the 20th century. I imagine these ideas and acts were what prompted Neale’s question to God. It is the answer I am most interested and now we come to that.

God says in response to Neale’s question about it being “wrong” to conduct foreign policy as I described above,

No. First, from my standpoint, nothing is “wrong”. But I understand how you use the term, so I will speak within the context of your vocabulary. I’ll use the term “wrong” to mean “that which is not serving you, given who and what you choose to be. This is how I’ve always used the terms “right” and “wrong” with you; it is always within this context, for, in truth, there is no Right and Wrong.
So, within that context, no, it is not wrong to base foreign policy decisions on vested interest considerations. What is wrong is to to pretend that you are not doing so.
This most countries do, of course, they take action – or fail to tak action – for one set of reasons, then give as a rationale another set of reasons.

Why? Why do countries do that?

Because governments know that if people understood the real reasons for most foreign policy decisions, the people would not support them.
This is true of governments everywhere. There are very few governments which do not deliberately mislead their people. Deception is part of government, for few people would choose to be governed the way they are governed – few would choose to be governed at all – unless government convinced them that its decisions were for their own good.

gene inserts: I see a parallel here between religion and government, anyone else? :^)

This is a hard convincing, for most people plainly see the foolishness in government. So government must lie to at least try to hold the people’s loyalty. Government (gene says AND religion!) is the perfect portrayer of the accuracy of the statement that if you lie big enough, long enough, the “lie” becomes the truth.
People in power must never let the public know how they came to power – nor all they’ve done and are willing to do to stay there.
Truth and politics do not and cannot mix because politics is the art of saying only what needs to be said – and saying it in just the right way – in order to achieve a desired end.
Not all politics are bad, but the art of politics is a practical art. It recognizes with great candor the psychology of most people. It simply notices that most people operate out of self-interest. So politics is the way that people of power see to convince you that their self-interest is your own.
Governments understand self-interest. That is why governments are very good at designing programs which give things to people.
Originally, governments had very limited functions. Their purpose was to “preserve and protect”. Then some added “provide.” When governments began to be the people’s provider as well as the people’s protector, governments started creating society, rather than preserving it.

Neale: But aren’t governments doing what the people want? Don’t governments merely provide the mechanism through which the people provide for themselves on a societal scale? For instance, in America we place a very high value on the dignity of human life, individual freedom, the importance of opportunity, the sanctity of children. So we’ve made laws and asked government to create programs to provide for the elderly, so they can retain their dignity past their earning years; to ensure equal employment and housing opportunities for all people – even those who are different from us, or with whose lifestyle we don’t agree; to guarantee, through child labor laws, that a nations children don’t become a nation’s slaves, and that no family with children goes without the basics of a life with dignity – food, clothing, shelter. gene inserts: THIS was written before the Welfare Reform Act of the late 90’s – these things are no longer guarantees and their are time limits on them.

Such laws reflect well upon your society. Yet, in providing for people’s needs, you must be careful not rob them of their greatest dignity: the exercise of personal power, individual creativity, and the single-minded ingenuity which allows people to notice that they can provide for themselves. It is a delicate balance which must be struck. You people seem to know only how to go from one extreme to the other. Either you want government to “do it all” for the people, or you want to kill all government programs and erase all government laws tomorrow.

I’m going to leave the excerpt at this point for today. And will continue it tomorrow, for as this is a multi-generational, multi-national issue, it deserves the benefit of at least a few days discussion, don’t you think? Well, I do. What I want to say here is simply that the “Great Society” idea of the 1960’s, Lyndon Johnson’s greatest accomplishment, was an abysmal failure, for it created a permanent underclass of our poorest citizens, destroyed the urban, mostly black, family with its short-sighted rule that a household could only qualify for assistance if there were but one able-bodied adult in the home, which forced families to either lie about who lived with whom, to forgo marriage, drove the rate of children born out of wedlock through the roof, and created a situation in which black males were devalued, needed only for their reproductive qualities. That program, AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children – what a misnomer THAT was), had one piece that was helpful and that was tossed out along with most of the original program during the welfare reform slash and burn of the late 1990’s. That piece was the ability to allow a parent to remain on AFDC long enough to get a four degree OR substantial technical training sufficient to allow her, almost always her, an opportunity to earn a living wage. That piece is gone now – the time alloted for training under TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) is not enough to allow one to acquire more than the skills necessary to flip hamburgers for $6.00 an hour. Why this country does not see the benefit in educating its children is beyond me. It DOES require the ability to look beyond the election cycle, which is two years, to see far enough enough into the future to realize that an educated workforce is a good thing for all of us.

My personal opinion is that “No Child Left Behind” should MEAN free public education through a four college degree OR an advanced technical school if that is what a particular child wants. It is much cheaper to educate our children than it is to incarcerate them. As things stand now, public education is woefully underfunded and undervalued and it ends after high school. Those few fortunate enough to have wealthy families or the intellectual, or athletic, capacity to acquire scholarships are far to few to sustain the rest of society. An investment in the infrastructure of our society in which we guaranteed each child an education to a baccalaureate degree or a technical school degree along with complete health care for all Americans is what is required for this to again be a “great society”. This will require a shift in the national thinking. For, as God pointed out, we seem capable of thinking only in extremes, and a majority of our society has been at the far right of thinking for most of the past 14 years, that segment being the one which which wants to kill all government programs today and provide only for defense – which is a society based on fear. If we fear the world, we must defend ourselves against it, if we love the world, we must open our arms to it. We’ll resume from this point tomorrow. Oh, you must know by now, I am in the camp which believes that love is the answer to every question, not weaponry. much love, :^) gene