Dear Friends,
It seems to me that compassion is not really a relative term. Compassion is both self effacing and uplifting to another. Compassion is never insidious.
Is this compassion… If a government provided it’s people, free of charge regardless of ability to pay, housing, food, healthcare, heat, and a stipend to cover incidentals like clothing and entertainment. Would most people work in that society? Why would they? It would make no sense, especially if, to cover the cost of these things a person needed to work two jobs, and live in squalor to boot.
Why have to get up every morning at the same time, get to work on time, else be chastised, struggle to get home just to write checks, for the things the government would cover for you, if you were indigent. The inevitable result would be a society that simply does not work. Nothing would get done. Why clean the streets when it is warmer at home? Why pick up the garbage and inhale that odor when the air at home is as sweet as a forest glen.
Such a society cannot long sustain itself. No matter the financial wherewithal of the government, that would be so unwise, as to make it’s inhabitants indigent. Such a society would collapse in it’s own squalor, piles of filth heaping into stinking mountains, collapsing roads, bridges and buildings would make any act unsafe, and pestilence everywhere. The first despot to come along would be cheered by the people the realization would come too late.
Lets further take our outlandish scenario, and say, the government has no wherewithal when it comes to money and pays for it’s largess with rapine. Punishing more and more the people who do the work society needs done? What if government spending far exceeds it’s ability to pay? It borrows. Borrows twenty percent of GDP then fifty percent then Eighty percent, interest piling up, even as the money is being spent to undermine the societal work ethic. The economy would drop as the debt would grow, until our hypothetical nation’s government sold bonds… and no one came to buy.
But anyone can see this clearly and with alacrity you might say. Especially a person schooled in liberal arts and big minded in their thoughts and actions? Such a society could not exist because the Elite would never let such a society come into existence. No member of the Elite would be so foolish as to not only allow but to encourage such a society to come into being. Further, simply being schooled and learned the Elite would certainly see such a society being conceived, were it happening.
But it may be, that to have such a society come into existence, would serve some malevolent minded interest of some of the Elite? Only a small faction of that small faction need be in on it or be complicit. The rest can be ridiculed into submission. Ten percent of ten percent is all that would be needed.
What could possibly be served by such a society coming into existence, the first despot to come along would enslave the weaklings immediately and force them to work… Forging their own chains. The ten percent of ten percent could be planning just this very thing to take charge and become a true aristocracy. Protecting people from themselves and dictating economic outcome depending on political status.
Of course, the ten percent of ten percent may believe themselves to be benevolent, and not being religious men, they don’t mind how the road is paved. Too bad they have the map upside down…
Would that be compassionate?
