Republicans do not accept that we are a society of mutual obligation. Only individual obligation: Each person keeps to himself, lives for himself and immediate family.
Theirs is a
moral stance – we are not masters and slaves – that becomes immoral when philosophy
(the inherent “right” not to be physically coerced) is replaced by psychology:
the psychology of the hurt, angry, alienated individual who despises community.
A society is three men of different skill and luck levels. Their tiny country is divided equally among them. But one has a greater gift for farming and another has more arable land. Does the third man, between them, force the other two to feed each other, or does he assume that decency and care will reign? There is no final answer because people are not thoroughly decent – that is, they must ultimately be selfish to live – and because coercion is destructive of the human psyche, and therefore immoral. We are a fused paradox.
Many people do not believe in private property or the profit motive. They are fools. The food at the end of my fork is private property, as is my home. My paycheck is profit, whether it’s fifty dollars beyond my survival needs or fifty million dollars. There is a valid question, though: How many of those fifty or those millions did I take from another person?
I am sure that any clear thinker – that is, anyone who can see beyond his self-esteem-succoring delusions – will see that we cannot undo society and become individual atoms. That is what fire does: it destroys good, solid things, the atoms flying apart.* But we also can’t become a frozen, stagnant, all-tied-together society. There, too, “At absolute zero there would be no motion, kinetic energy or vibrations. Which means matter itself as well as molecules would cease to exist.”**
The political parties are not consensus principles. They are consensus and fickle moods that have congealed in self-defense against the other. They are the confused mental-emotional states of the third countryman who, one day to the next day, doesn’t know what to do with his neighbors.
The only choice we have is to evolve to a place of greater decency and care and to “carry a big stick.”***
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* A description of fire at an atomic level | Physics Forums.
** https://socratic.org/questions/what-happens-to-molecules-at-absolute-zero.
*** https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/theodore_roosevelt_130674.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.