Many of you may wonder why I have been so dogged with my "Quotes for Discussion" posts over the last year. I usually offer them up without context or commentary, and they are tangential to the point of the sites where I post them at best. Further, few people, including few of you, bother to read them or discuss them. And even more, sometimes the quotes, and my purpose in posting them, is very hard to gather. So, I’ll tell you why.
It is my belief that most political programs and ideas fail because they are not conceived or implemented with people in mind. Take, for example, Marxism. Marx knew a lot about economics, about philosophy, and about politics. But every single society based on Marxism, from the Soviet Union to each commune and kibbutz has eventually failed, and failed badly. The reason for that is simple: Marx understood people, individual people, very poorly.
This is the root of my politics: that it has to be about people, and how they really live. I don’t support legalization of heroin and marijuana, prostitution and gambling, property rights and gun rights, because I think any of those things are so great in and of themselves. People will abuse drugs beyond their capacity to manage, cheat on their spouses and lose their paychecks, believe in the ownership of their property and seek to defend themselves with violence, whether I condone it or not. Policies meant to attack these things will inevitably fail and cause great injustice.
Yet why do so many societies, particularly democratic ones, attempt to inact policies such as these and many more, despite the fact that they will be self-defeating? My belief is that few people, particularly in politics, consider people as they truly are. People, in all their intelligence and stupidity, vapidity and depth, avarice and generosity, are the object of all of our political policies. Far too often, we forget that. We speak of politics as if we seek to have them conducted by the philosopher-kings of Plato’s Republic, forgetting ourselves in Plato’s appeal and ignorance.
I post those quotes to remind us about people, and to try to get people to think about them, often in a different way than usual for politics. Because it is easy to speak of political policy and strategy without thinking about these things, about the crucial role that people will have in them. And people usually care about much different things than laws and taxes, or who wins elections. There is a reason why for every song protesting a war there are several thousand about love and good times with friends. There is a reason why action stories and detective novels outsell political polemics. There is a reason why the rap of braggary outsells that of positive messages and social critique.
Most people aren’t like us. Most of them don’t think much about the policies and strategems which we debate so ruthlessly and will effect them all so tremendously. So, I post these quotes in the hope that you will take a moment out of your political blogging time and think about something different. And when you come back to our usual fare, perhaps you don’t even know it, but you are somewhat changed. A part of you is still thinking about human beings, in all their frailty and imperfection.
Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is that silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for a living?
You kind of grin and look down your nose at him. You think he’s nuts, know what I mean, or he doesn’t have any ambition. And then you take a good look at yourself, and you stop wondering about the other guy.
...You’ve got all your hands and feet. Your health is okay, and you make a nice appearance, and ambition – man! You’ve got it. You’re young, I guess you’d call thirty young, and you’re strong. You don’t have much education, but you’ve got more than plenty of other people who go to the top. And yet with all that – with all you’ve had to do with – this is as far as you’ve got. And something tells you, you’re not going much farther if any.
And there’s nothing to be done about it now, of course, but you can’t stop hoping. You can’t stop wondering...
All you can do is go on like those other guys go on. The guy giving haircuts to dogs, and the guy sweeping up horse manure. Hating it. Hating yourself.
And hoping.
~Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman