SOCIALISM LEVELS THE PLAYING FIELD

In a letter to the editor, titled "Conservatives trust people" (Monday, June 27, 2004, Spokesman Review) Robert Leach attempts to discredit democratic socialism. He points out quite accurately that “government does not give money to anyone, it only takes and redistributes wealth.” He calls that, rightly, “socialism”. He also points out that “the ‘rich’ earn their money”. Well, now there he goes quite wrong.

Many rich inherit their money or their families give them good educations which the poor can’t afford. All one has to do is look at the average earning power of an Ivy Leaguer versus someone at a smaller junior college to see the uneven start education gives citizens. Further, all studies show that impoverished, malnourished students can suffer brain damage from malnutrition and that hunger makes students less able to perform well in school. These are only a few of the inequities between the children of the rich and the poor when it comes to the capacity to "earn" and compete, not to mention quite simple things like the affordability of books in impoverished surroundings.

Also, most educated people understand that genetics plays a large part in how well any one individual will do during the course of her life. Many people of average or above average intelligence fail to be grateful that they got the gift of normalcy. Instead they act superior when faced with those who do less well than they do.

If we want to really believe that the “rich earn their money”, we must remove all the benefits which give the children of the rich a head start. A good democratic socialist would say that money ought not be allowed to be inherited and that a rich man’s money ought to go to making sure that all schools are excellent, a very expensive proposition. Then a socialist would say that with the playing field level and fair, we would truly see who “earns” what and how much. In short, a socialist does believe in the redistribution of wealth so that every citizen gets a fair start in life. Otherwise the rich and the supporters of the rich just need to shut up about “earning” wealth. A gift of education and wealth to the young of the rich is not earned.


PRE AND POST FREUDIAN TRIBES

The world is now divided between modern peoples and primitive peoples, between what I call pre and post Freudian tribes or those who live in the 21st Century and those who still lag behind in the 1st Century. Post Freudian peoples understand the psychology of the human animal, the evolution of consciousness, the ambiguity in reality and the relativity of religious belief. They inhabit Australia, New Zealand, Europe and eastern Europe and are also living in China, Canada and India and, increasingly, in South America. In America, the population is almost evenly divided by modern post Freudians and primitive, pre Freudian bushmen. Pre Freudian bushmen live in a religious unreality, believing in things which don’t exist in the substantial world in a religious miasma of superstition and dread. Almost all the trouble on our globe these days is caused by the pre Freudian bushmen.

Here in America, the pre Freudian bushmen support and carry out a war against the pre Freudian bushmen in Iraq and elsewhere. In Palestine, the pre Freudian bushmen, the Sharonites, fight the pre Freudian tribes of Arafatian bush peoples. Only recently have tribes of bushmen in Ireland and England given up killing one another over their religious superstitions. There’s some progress for post Freudians in that, but in Africa little skirmishes between bushmen break out all the time.

Looked at through one pair of glasses, an educated man or woman can almost make out the broad outlines of a kind of World War III because these primitive bushmen tribes are battling it out world wide while we, post Freudian, modern peoples stand aside in shock and awe at the viscousness of the religious wars of the pre Freudian bushmen. We can only hope they don’t destroy the entire world, us too, with their simple minded religious mentalities.

The strange aspect of this scene is that all these various bush tribes are united in one very common way—they are all fundamentalist religionists, they all believe in the most outlandish, primitive sorts of unreal fictions which supposedly happened in pre historic times and which found their way into history with the rise of the written word where they became more fixed in mind than the earlier, unrecorded beliefs of those religions. Not only that, their superstitions were all written down in a relatively short time span, there in the middle east. A good reading of some of Joseph Campbell’s work will enlighten us on the rise of religions around the globe.

You would think they would appreciate one another’s dedication to superstition and ignorance. But, alas, ignorant and violent, they fight on. We modern peoples can only hang on, spread intelligence with our genes and practice healthy, unsuperstitious activities. We must survive the idiocy of the pre Freudian bushmen and hope these primitives kill each other off as quickly as possible so the globe can be inherited not by the meek but by the intelligent and strong. In peace, modern peoples must find a way to continue our evolution so that the modern, post Freudian world can emerge even stronger at the end of this dark, primitive era in human history.