Monday, March 02, 2009

Fear Of Big Government

Why do so many conservatives fear big government? Isn't the government "we the people"? The government is not separate from us. The government represents the people. "Big Government" to the super rich and powerful means they don't want "we the people" to have any control or regulations, to restrain what they do. Now almost everyone is suffering because of this lack of restraint. The state of the economy can't be blamed entirely on the the rich and powerful though; the continued "having" way of living, a life dependent on having much more than necessary has brought us to the economic condition we now find ourselves.

Eric Fromm's book To Have Or To Be? published in 1976 was very prophetic in it's prediction 33 years ago of economic disaster, if we did not change our attitudes from a "having" society to a "being" society. In it he writes, "Even authors whom one cannot call radical humanists, since they hardly transcend the transpersonal, mechanistic attitude of our age....do not fail to see that a radical inner human change is the only alternative to economic catastrophe. Mesarovic and Pestel demand a "new world consciousness....a new attitude toward nature, based on harmony rather than on conquest....a sense of identification with future generations... For the first time in Man's life on earth, he is being asked to refrain from doing what he can do; he is being asked to restrain his economic and technological advancement, or at least to direct it differently from before; he is being asked by all the future generations of the earth to share his good fortune with the unfortunate--not in a spirit of charity but in a spirit of necessity. He is being asked to concentrate now on the organic growth of the total world system. Can he, in good conscience, say no?" They conclude that without these fundamental human changes, "Homo sapiens is a good as doomed."

I don't know if the new administration will be able to fix the economic mess we find ourselves in today, but even if it succeeds in the short term; unless society becomes less greedy in its consumerism, and more open to living in harmony with all people, all nations and with all of nature, and to look for happiness within our selves instead of in our possessions, the world condition can only get worse.