Not Everyone Wants the Good

I have come to realize that some people don’t WANT the world to be what I’d assumed everyone wanted: that all the arrangements are FAIR, that nobody is abused or robbed or murdered, that everyone has the opportunity to make the most of their God-given gifts and find fulfillment. That the relations among people are beautifully filled with love and caring.

Isn’t that the portrait of the IDEAL world? Doesn’t everyone want that?

Apparently not.

For years, I have been quoting a famous line from the ancient Greek historian, Thucydides. In it, Thucydides has the Athenians declare to the people they are trying to bully into submission that this is the way of the world: “The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.” They are actually endorsing injustice, as they prepare as the stronger party to annihilate the weaker. The Athenians don’t care about “right” which, they say, is only in question among equals in power. Power is all that matters. One needs no justification if one doesn’t even believe in Justice.

But for me, that line is the diagnosis of the terrible disease of Evil that has afflicted humankind since the beginnings of civilization. So I keep quoting it to indicate: This is precisely what we have to change about the world for the world to be a good place. And the idea at the center of my life’s work says that what Thucydides describes is the central problem that humankind has been challenged to solve. That diagnosis of “the way of the world” is part of my attempt to show just what our situation is. Because of the problem of power, our history has been ugly and our future may prove to be self-destruction.

I’ve lately been looking at the Athenians more deeply than I had before. I had always recognized that they were saying that the world is not a place to expect justice, and were amorally saying, “We’re going to take advantage of that reality and, being strong, we’ll just do what we want.” But I hadn’t thought about how they were describing the way of the world as being also the way they WANTED it to be.

But these days, I am compelled to see that the Athenians’ attitude — embracing the world of injustice, making might make right, so long as one is the winner of the struggle for power — is visibly present in the America of these times.

Earlier this year, Donald Trump’s right-hand man, Stephen Miller, was quoted as saying, in a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” The Athenians’ very thoughts, expressed in the same spirit.

• It is the spirit that motivated the Athenians who, in pursuit of more power for their empire, compelled the inhabitants of an independent island that wanted only to mind its own business to choose between subservience to Athens and death.
• In Stephen Miller, it is a spirit that justifies the fascistic authoritarian way the Trump administration has wielded its power: sending ICE into cities governed by its opposition to terrorize the people; threatening institutions for exercising their freedom of speech to criticize the Power.

We have good reason to regard Stephen Miller here as the Voice of the Trump administration, both because of the unique role he seems to play as Trump’s close advisor and because the Trump administration has acted in so many ways in accordance with the power-loving spirit of “the strong do what they can.”

When Miller expressed that spirit, he was giving voice to a larger set of forces that don’t regard democracy as a plus, because it makes well-being a more generalized human reality, whereas the spirit of fascism prefers that the world be divided between the strong who take whatever they want, and the weak that are going to suffer continuous injustice.

In fact, American democracy can be understood as an enormous historical project to make the Athenians’ description less true. “One person, one vote” attempts to equalize power, for in the world the Athenians described, justice is in question only among equals in power. Individual rights enable a person to stand up and speak their mind without bringing the power of the state down upon them.

We can see “the strong do what they can” stamped in various forms across the whole of the Trumpian project:

• the siphoning of billions more dollars to the richest,
• the stripping away of healthcare coverage from millions of the most vulnerable,
• the intimidation of legitimate private entities,
• the outright usurpation of powers, denied the President in the Constitution, over tariffs, and
• the waging of war on the Leader’s lone say-so.

At its heart, the battle between democracy and fascism isn’t just between two “systems of government,” but between two profoundly different images of how human beings should relate to one another.

In democracy, everyone is entitled to pursue their own ends, but the freedom of each ends where the rights of others begin. The relationship among citizens is one of mutual respect, and an openness to using cooperation to improve things for everyone’s sake. In the ideal, goodwill and fairness pervade the system.

Democracy reflects the desire for human relations to be governed by goodwill and mutual respect, rather than animosity and domination.

The fascist wants a world where MIGHT MAKES RIGHT because power enables them to get whatever they want, whether it is right or not. And the record of fascism shows a still darker side: part of what they want is the power to make weaker people suffer.

• The death camps of the Nazi regime met the fascists’ need: “We must have someone under our power whom we force to suffer at our hands.”
• In less extreme form, we can see something of that same dynamic in America in the handling of immigrants. From the beginning, Trump has dealt with the immigration issue as if cruelty were a feature, not a bug, as if inflicting pain and terror were more important even than making America immigrant-free: from the ripping of children away from their parents in Trump’s first term to the trampling on the rights of the men rounded up to be sent to the prison in El Salvador.

The fascists are into POWER because only in a world ruled by power can they gain the ability to gratify their hatred, express their rage, and inflict suffering on those weaker than themselves.

I had tended unthinkingly to assume that everyone would welcome a world filled with goodwill. But for someone with a pressing need to inflict suffering on others, such a world would leave that need unaddressed.

Anyone with a sense of how human psychology works should readily recognize this dynamic as the likely result of having been on the other side of such a power relationship as a child. What is going on is a reversal of roles in order to enact the revenge that the injury suffered as victim has inflamed in a person’s heart.

It takes INJURY to make a person WANT the kind of world Stephen Miller was describing in explaining, not even trying to justify, what he and his President are doing. Justice is declared irrelevant. It is INJURY that generates the felt need to do to others the terrible thing that was originally DONE TO oneself.

I am trying to remind myself that for some people, a world in which everyone is happy is not what they crave. They themselves will not be happy unless they can get power and use it to make some other people unhappy.

Fascistic politics are a symptom of something having gone wrong in the domain of human relationships. People have developed so that the well-being of others is not of positive value:

• For some, it may simply be indifference concerning others. Their selfishness is not limited by caring.
• Others will have been treated in a way that makes them want to mistreat others in return. A desire for vengeance that is quite contrary to the spirit of Goodwill.

Neither suggests that their interpersonal experience has led to full human thriving.

It’s clear that, when it comes to the human Good, “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” is a better guide than “Use your power to get whatever you want, regardless of the costs to others.”

There is no need to look at the contrast between democracy and fascism in a value-neutral, morally-relativistic fashion. Value enters the world through what proves LIFE-SERVING, as creatures naturally experience POSITIVELY what has ancestrally aided their species’ survival. (See “Realities that Emerge with the Evolution of the Experiential Realm.”)

Human beings evolved as creatures whose survival depended on goodwill and cooperation within the group, and evolution has shaped us to experience such life-serving relationships positively—as sources of satisfaction and fulfillment. It takes the pain of serious psychic injury to instill in people a need for the opposite: it is the unwelcome occurrence of such injury that leads to an order driven by hatred, domination, and the desire to inflict suffering on others.

Democracy aligns with the requirements of the Good. Fascism aligns with the ways of Evil.