It's a good line. I wish I'd said it. Yet the grim reality of contemporary political life is that it really is not that significant when the ballots are tallied. The fact of the matter is that poor people generally don't vote. One reason why people are poor is that they care so little for the personal self-discipline associated with responsibility. They just aren't willing to spend the effort to vote. The percentage of eligible voters who actually vote in the ghettos of America is much lower than in middle-class neighborhoods.
Why, then, do we see the growth, of welfarism in most Western, industrial nations? Even if the growth of welfarism is finally being checked, it is already such a large part of national and state budgets that most spending programs are still sacrosanct politically. Why is it that the middle class, which has the controlling votes, seems unable to reverse the drift into socialism?
One reason is the existence of the public education system. Government schools, controlled by state and, because of financing, Federal bureaucrats, are by definition agents of the State. They are financed to produce, students who vote for more government programs and greater Federal power. To imagine that state-approved textbooks are anything other than propaganda for the statist system, is naïve. The government has used our confiscated dollars to finance a generation of students who regard such confiscation as morally valid and economically sound. Another reason is guilt. The widespread sense of guilt among the citizenry of modern societies is unquestionable. The psychiatric profession has developed in terms of a vast market for guilt-ridden citizens. Rushdoony's comments are significant in this regard:
The development of a good conscience and a Christian culture is thus an important aspect of the Christian life. A contrary development is increasingly in evidence in the Western world, and especially in the United States, i.e., the development by systematic indoctrination of a bad conscience. The political cultivation of guilt is a central means to power, for guilty men are slaves; their conscience is in bondage, and hence they are easily made objects of control. Guilt is thus systematically taught for purposes of control. (R. J. Rushdoony, Politics of Guilt and Pity [Thoburn Press, 11121 Pope's Head Rd., Fairfax, VA 22030, (1970) 1978, $5], p. 19.)
The Bible teaches that a godly moral order leads directly to an outpouring of economic, political, military, and familial blessings. This is taught in many places, but especially in two chapters of the book of Deuteronomy, 8 and 28. But these chapters also warn against the temptations associated with these visible, external blessings. They can become snares, tempting men to puff themselves up and attribute their blessings to themselves and their own power, rather than to their faithfulness to God and a godly law-order.
Modern secular civilization has abandoned the religious roots of its prosperity, and increasingly it is abandoning the moral and legal roots. Therefore, concludes Rushdoony:
The more a civilization advances, the deeper will its sense of sin become, because the increase of prosperity and cultural advantages will only increase the masochistic desire to pay for progress, which the individuals unconsciously believe requires atonement before enjoyment. As a result, the very liberating forces of civilization themselves call into existence the forces of enslavement. The citizens of the civilization progressively demand, political enslavement as their masochistic price for advancement. As a result, the most ruthless totalitarian enslavement is invited, and the culture uses its material liberation to forge a new slavery. (Politics of Guilt and Pity, p. 12.)
Hollywood's Maoists
Have you ever wondered why it appears that the biggest stars on stage, screen, and television are proponents of politically liberal causes? Isn't it strange that the conservative politicians have just about run out of actors to endorse them, now that the John Wayne crowd is dead or retired (Ward Bond, Walter Brennan, etc)? The rock stars aren't belting out their 100-decibel lyrics for the likes of Ronald Reagan. (The fact that rock concerts can be presented as benefits, and that such funds are not subject to "fair campaign" law restrictions, has delivered an important fund-raising tool into the hands of political liberals.)
Consider the nature of the economics of stardom. Some otherwise undistinguished citizen has a particular gift for pleasing the public: good looks. a sense of humor, the ability to produce emotional responses from viewers if the script is good enough, or whatever. These gifts are in limited quantity, and even among those who have them, only a few seem to climb to the top. Only a handful stay there. (John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and a few others survived among the men, and Katherine Hepburn and, maybe, Bette Davis, among the women. Why? Even they can't, or couldn't, explain it.)
The public showers them with money. They please millions of people by means of the camera. All those millions of little people pay a few cents per ticket to the actor, but there are so many tickets sold that the actor gets rich. He doesn't really understand or appreciate market economics. He simply knows that he is getting fabulously wealthy. Lots of other people aren't, he notices, including people with truly extraordinary talents--talents that don't happen to have broad market appeal. These other people "help humanity," meaning that they help a few people in important ways, but they don't help millions of people in a seemingly unimportant way, namely, to enjoy themselves, for an hour or two at the movies or on a weekly TV show.
Then there are the millions of people--yes, even billions of people--who are 'poor and who will remain poor. The actor compares their plight with his wealth. He makes the comparison in terms of the only framework he has, the brand of economics and politics presented in his high school or junior college textbooks. He then listens to the famous economists (like John Kenneth Galbraith), and they also reinforce his basically low opinion of his profession's contribution to Western civilization. He is getting rich, he is recognized on the street, he is fawned over by fans, he is invited to cocktail parties by the rich, and all those billions of poor people go to bed hungry at night. This bothers him.
If guilt were a disease, Hollywood would be suffering an epidemic. It is not a disease, however. It is a state of mind and a judicial position before God. If men are unwilling to deal with guilt by means of Christ's atonement, then they will seek other means of atonement, and one of these means is to vote for political programs that will take some of their money--which they feel guilty about--and lots of the middle class money--which they also have tended to feel guilty about--and way too much of my money, which I don't feel guilty about in the slightest. Instead of adopting the principle of the tithe, the promoters of political atonement by means of class masochism have adopted the principle of the involuntary triple or quadruple tithe--a tithe which is paid to the State, not the needy, and then is filtered down to the poor in order to strengthen the goals of the State bureaucrats. The chief goals are these: institutional survival and control.
Self-Defense
Guilt-manipulators are very skilled, and they have used their skills to claw their way to the top positions of the media. (I would certainly include the pulpit and the classroom as media.) They have used their verbal or literary skills to spread the gospel of guilt-reduction by means of masochism, especially political masochism. There can be little doubt concerning their success over the last three generations.
What can people do to reduce the threat of manipulation by the guilt hucksters? First, take care of the root cause, which happens to be personal guilt before God. (See the book of John, chapter three, and the book of Romans, chapter 5, for starters.) Second, they should begin to take steps to remove the traces of guilt in their interpersonal relationships. If a person has wronged another, he should make restitution. This is the basis of all biblical ethics. Third, he should adopt the tithe as a normal part of his expenditure patterns. He should give some of his income away to private charities that are contributing something positive to society. He must take care to investigate the actual results of the efforts of such charities; throwing money around aimlessly is Washington's way of dealing with guilt, not God's. Fourth, he should take care of his own family (I Timothy 5:8 is specific in this regard). Charity might not begin at home, but it sure begins before the tax man's unrighteous confiscation. Fifth, he should learn to recognize the arguments of the guilt-manipulators, starting with the argument that one man's is the cause of several other people's poverty. Sixth, he should begin to convert a portion of his capital into forms less easily confiscated by the political agents of the guilt-manipulators. His goal is to keep his capital intact, so that he might better achieve his ends in life, not the State's. Seventh, he should endeavor to make more money. increasing one's personal capital strengthens the private sector of the economy. Making money (i.e., increasing one's capital) is a healthy activity when accomplished within the proper moral and legal framework. It increases one's control of external affairs, thereby reducing the necessity of creating huge, expensive, inept, and tyrannical bureaucracies to control one's external affairs.
In other words, people have got to begin to abandon the politics of guilt and pity. Political salvation through class masochism is a dead-end. It leads to economic breakdown, precisely because it leads to moral breakdown. People are burdened with a sense of guilt, and then they are misled concerning the ways to reduce that guilt. Guilt-ridden people cannot be trusted to make personally responsible decisions. That's one reason why there are so many people in mental institutions today. They simply cannot handle their sense of guilt, and neither the psychiatrists nor the politicians have helped most of them to recover.
Guiltaholics Anonymous
We need an institution for the guiltaholics to visit in order to dry out. A successful one would probably be based on some version of Alcoholics Anonymous' 12 pillars. (Churches used to be suitable institutions, but too many of them have been captured.) Patients would acknowledge to themselves and others that they have reached the end of the road, that they can no longer handle their guilt feelings. They would admit that their own unaided efforts have heretofore failed. They would call upon a higher personal power to aid them. They would try to undo the damage their previous actions caused, by making restitution, and they would discipline themselves not to worry about past actions for which they cannot possibly make restitution. They would cease making grandiose plans and resolutions for future success over social guilt, and they would adopt a philosophy of "easy does it" when confronting the problems of the world. They would, in short, take full responsibility for their actions, while admitting that God will assist them in achieving their sobriety, and denying that a new political program would be anything more than another shot glass full of poison.
The politics of guilt and pity, which is intimately linked to the politics of envy, is the politics of the twentieth century. Until we can rid ourselves of this political burden, we will continue to see the grinding down of our personal freedoms, not to mention the eventual reduction of our per capita productivity. The battle for economic freedom is and will continue to be a theological battle, not primarily a debate over comparative efficiency or output per unit of resource input. This battle will not be won by means of graphs alone.
Biblical Economics Today Vol. 3, No. 1 (February/March 1980)
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