Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Resistance and the Bandits


When I was recently asked, “How do you join the resistance?” I had to interpret the question. What I think was meant is, how do you join the resistance movement against the Trump administration?  While I have never been politically active, I can relate to many of the issues raised by those who are extremely uncomfortable with the actions of this president. His insistence on limiting government controls on business, along with abandoning the public school system, trashing the environment, cutting financial support for the poor, and pressing for a “whites only” society in America are appalling to me. Plus I think he’s a bully.

That being said, I am not a protest marcher. Nor am I a big fan of Hillary Clinton, who is just too glib for me.  And I‘m not convinced that large gatherings do anything more than reassure the people who gather that they aren’t alone. So from one perspective, I don’t really want join the political resistance movement. The need to join the broader resistance against greedy self-centeredness, however, seems pretty straightforward to me. I join the resistance by being committed to a set of values. As Timothy McCarthy put it,   “Values are essential, not only to resistance, but to social change. We need to be able to say what’s wrong and we also need to be able to say what we would want to be right and how we might get there.”

What I want to be right is my posture toward others – being unwilling to do things at their expense in order to have an advantage over them for myself. Nor do I want to participate in or applaud the actions of those who take that course. As to how we might get there, it has to do with an awareness of one’s values and actions. And it would be easy to get caught up in unimportant particulars. As Carlo Capolla wrote, “From action or inaction each one of us derives a gain or a loss and at the same time one causes a gain to someone else.” It’s impossible to keep an accounting of everything we do and say. We probably get to social change by focusing on the major things, not the insignificant ones. Capolla also wrote that “always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.” [1]  Which is pretty much beside the point.

More to the point is that when one person takes an action by which he makes a gain causing another person a loss, he has acted as a bandit. The perfect bandit is one who robs you without causing you any extra loss or harm. He steals $50 and you lose $50.  But there are few perfect bandits. Imperfect bandits are those whose gains result in fewer or more losses to others. A leader who deports 100 innocent people so he can gain the power to deport another hundred people, or so he or she can feel important,  is an imperfect bandit. And then there are the stupid people who insist on causing harm to other people without deriving any gain. Drunk drivers who kill others are at the top of the list. I haven’t decided whether many of our political leaders are bandits or just stupid, but I don’t want to end up in either camp.

 

  1. Cipolla, Anthony, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. See http://www.mulino.it/ebook .



 

No comments:

Post a Comment