The late Margaret Thatcher, when she was the conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain during the Reagan era in America, proclaimed infamously that there is no such thing as “society.”
The only existing realities for her were, apparently, market forces and rough and tumble capitalists, large and small, with no apparent communal goals other than winning no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle, dog-eat-dog competitions. If “society” doesn’t exist, then there’s no such thing as pulling together to achieve common goals. To deny the social situations that arise from the associations of individuals is a kind of intellectual insanity. Surely, she misspoke in the heat of some debate. Alas, she like many politicians on the American right, hold such lunacy to be self-evident.
Last week, nearly a half a world away and seven years after Thatcher’s death, a group of ranchers in Carlsbad, NM, along with the Carlsbad Irrigation District, acting as representatives of a “society” in southern New Mexico, prevailed in district court over a big capitalist firm, Intrepid Potash of Denver, that had applied for an application to divert its water rights to the Pecos River for use in potash refining, and in turn sell them to the oil and gas industry, the biggest brawler around, for use in fracking, one presumes.
None of those ranchers would have been able to stop Intrepid alone. Just like individualist and market forces would never had been able to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Markets can’t cure disease. Pursuing only your own misperceived self-interest as a conservative individualist could not only get you very sick but it could make you the source of sickness in others, all because of your ideologically supported selfishness. Not wearing a mask and gloves and keeping social distance isn’t just about defiant stupidity, it’s risking the health of others by possibly being an unwitting carrier of the disease.
Parties of drunken brats, and as many as 15 states with Republican governors who refuse to engage in responsible public health measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 contagion, are mortal dangers to everyone around them. The kids are thoughtless, the governors are lethally incompetent.
Individualism and “competition” without cooperation, exercising the adolescent “right to be free” without self-restraint and respect for others, is in this situation not only suicidal but potentially homicidal.
Of course, cooperation without competition can be stultifying. Without room for individual initiative it becomes totalitarian and enforced by tyrannical means. There must be room for both. Competition without cooperation — Mitch McConnell-ism — leads to the dead end that is American politics today.
If political disagreements become so rigidly entrenched that no reasoned collaboration is possible, then both sides languish from a lack of what biologists might call hybrid vigor, which in political terms means an increase in innovation and adaptability that comes from the insights and strengths gained by opponents who find common ground.
With social Darwinism permeating policy, and excluding any differing views, you can end up with a simple-minded, narcissistic “leader” like we have, whose total focus on himself blinds him to realities around him. The results can be staggeringly negative — vast joblessness, mounting deaths from a disease the market isn’t designed to stop and the “strongest nation in the world” bewilderingly unprepared for what it could have at least predicted and planned for if those in power had cared about “society,” that is, the rest of us. But our leadership has made a cult out of the bankrupt political philosophy of cutthroat competition which views common interests (and the regulations that serve it), as arising from a mob of losers and parasites — us, presumably — who must be treated with malign neglect.
In the long run, the market itself does nothing beyond help to accumulate or lose wealth. Want to save yourself from COVID-19? Go to a heroic nurse or physician who are serving the common good as moral individuals with social conscience. Don’t go to the Wall Street. If you want to reopen your little non-essential business, don’t look to the market for help, but become a responsible part of a well-informed and practical social response to curbing and ending the mass disease that’s temporarily shut you down.
All monopolistic philosophies have a weakness for being blindsided by realities they simply can’t see coming because of their ideological blind spots. One of the profound ironies of the post-Reagan/Thatcher era, for instance, is that unbridled capitalism, which by definition has no sense of social responsibility, has started to attack the private interests that its philosophy was designed to protect. Even Ayn Rand, the philosophical propagandist behind Thatcher, Reagan, Trump and McConnell would be aggrieved, I think, by what author Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism,” in her book by the same name. We are living in a time when the private lives of rugged individuals are mined for information on how they behave as members of a society of consumers with no protection against snoops and spies for profit.
Of course, individuality, private motivation and self-reliance are crucial to a healthy life in a free society that protects both private and public interests. It goes almost without saying, though, that if all we did, as a mere collection of competitive individuals, was to look out for ourselves and our immediate interests alone, while bitterly opposing being taxed for the common good, we would have no social safety net for when we get old or when luck goes against. We would have no public roads either — no cops, no firemen, no EMTs, no electric grid, no sanitation, no public health, no mail service and no business.
It seems highly likely to me, however, that public efforts to serve the common good like “social distancing,” “sheltering in place,” and wearing gloves and masks will, indeed, slow the spread of COVID-19 contagion and eventually stop it, while bringing about more hopeful conditions that may lead to the revival of our anxious and battered economy.
The success of such “social” efforts to protect ourselves, our families and everyone around us may also help to prove a political and philosophic point, one which every good parent knows —that selfish and bullying behavior, and shaving the truth and cheating to get ahead, never pays off in the end.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Many of us would love it if you ran this country, though I wouldn’t wish the job on you. Another timely and brilliant column. Thank you!
Well said Barret…. a flexible society, with the capacity for cooperation IS what separates us behaviorally from other species.