The social bond of a cooperative society is trust. Yes, cooperators hedge their bets by agreeing upon strictly enforced laws that prohibit theft and murder and all their corollaries. However, honesty which is the companion virtue of trust cannot be legislated. Some individuals, though eager to take advantage of the benefits of a cooperative society, do not hesitate to break the social bond that holds that society together.
No where in our cooperative society is this more apparent than in the free market where goods and services are mutually and voluntarily exchanged.
Have you ever stood face to face with a potential trading partner and had that potential partner lie to you without batting an eye? I have. Most individuals have, but most especially individuals who own their own business.
I've owned a business for almost 20 years. I can usually sniff out the liars, the big talkers who promised what you wanted to hear, who eventually always take themselves too seriously and end up betraying their intentions. Remarkably, liars are few and far between in the business world. Non-business people would be amazed at the amount of business that is done in this country on a handshake. Big business may run by means of lawyers and contracts, but small business operates on trust. My relations with suppliers and customers is virtually all based on trust. Many times I have staked a year's profits, or the future of my entire business, on a handshake and the honesty of the other guy.
However, you do occasionally run into the exception, the pathological liar who is able to fly under your truth radar because of his ability to believe in his own lies. Such men lie with a straight face and get you to believe them. This is the type of person that illustrates the awesome, destructive power of dishonesty and the ideology that often is its underlying basis. Of course, such natural-born liars are not self-sufficient. They depend on the naivete or greed or trusting nature of their "mark" to close the deal. They're really good at what they do, so much so that an honest person is dumbfounded to discover that such people even exist.
Politics is not like small business. Politics trades in lies and liars, except in politics lies are not called lies. Political lies are called spin, or semantics, or shading, or being disingenuous or being inaccurate or not fully forthcoming. I'm sick of it.
Take Occupy Wall Street, for instance. The President has compared Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party.
Surely the President sees what we all can see: that Occupy Wall Street is far different from the Tea Party. Yet he tells the lie. Yet, he repeats the lie, as does Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. In fact, Ms. Wasserman-Schultz has made lying her business and has perfected it to a high art. And the media, let's not forget the so-called mainstream media like the New York Times. They trade in lies. What is amazing is that in this day and age political lies are exposed daily on the internet at sites such as The Drudge Report and Weasel Zippers. Yet, those exposed liars continue to lie with impunity. It boggles the mind. I'm not going to bother citing more examples. They are there for all to see by honestly making a daily review of the sites mentioned.
I'm convinced political liars are enabled by something called ideology, i.e., a pre-conceived mindset of beliefs about how the world works that is written indeliably on a person's consciousness. Ideology is like a religious belief. There is little if any basis for it in reality. It is based entirely on faith, which is predicated on the ability to keep and profess a belief in the very face of hard and real evidence to the contrary.
For instance, it is a waste of breath to argue with a Christian about the existence of God. Belief in God is completely a matter of faith. That something supernatural could be proved by natural means is a contradiction. So it is with, say, Marxism. Don't waste your breath on a Marxist. Maxism is a faith-based ideology. It's tenets fly in the face of reality, but Marxists get around such pesky facts by inventing alternate facts and changing definitions. I won't bother to explain. All anyone who is truly interested has to do is study Marxism in the light of all we have learned about economics. The central tenet of Marxist belief ("From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.) flies in the face of all we know about human action and cooperative society. The tenet presupposes an all-knowing redistributive authority.
In the coming political season surrounding the elections of 2012 it is essential that clear-thinking, honest Americans not be surprised or side-swiped by the existence and words of pathological liars in the press or on the stump. It is essential we question candidates and their supporters -- whether overt in their campaigns or covert in the press -- about their ideological beliefs. And it is important that we are able to distinguish ideology from reality.
In a recent conversation about politics with a long-time best friend I was told that I needed to make an effort to see all sides of every argument and to understand that each side has a valid point of view. I immediately rejected such relativism as an attempt to portray any honest thought or observation as an ideology. There is no validity to the Marxist argument which is premised upon fantasy and arbitrary definitions. Free market principles of economics and the social principles of cooperation, property, freedom and peace, which are firmly grounded in the science of human action, do not constitute an arbitrary ideology based on faith anymore than mathematics does.
Class warfare is an expressly Marxist concept. When the President expounds on class warfare and the measures needed to correct America's mal-distribution of wealth, he is spouting Marxist ideology. The lies and contradictions we catch him repeating on camera do not change his mind or even phase him because his idea of truth is predicated on the Marxist ideology he has accepted as a matter of faith.
The President doesn't understand the destructive nature of the fire he's playing with. By pitting the factory owner against the factory worker, and the 99% against the 1%, he is planting seeds of distrust in a cooperative society that is held together entirely by trust. When he and his Congressional cronies use the law to implement the measures he says are needed to correct free market capitalism, he is introducing institutional distrust into the free market place.
The social bond of trust that glues our cooperative society together, as resilient as it is and has been, cannot long survive such destructive ideological power.
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