I have been engaged in a reading frenzy that seems to unintentionally follow a single thread of violence, greed and power. These are topics that I normally steer away from, but for the moment are focusing my attention. The first book in this series was "I am Malala" (she was the young school girl that was shot in the face by the Taliban while on a school bus a couple of years ago), the second was "The Imperial Cruise" (a book about Theodore Roosevelt's imperialistic thrusts into several wars, particularly the Spanish American War in the Philippines), and now I am reading "The Source" by James Michener (a novel about the history of a fictitious place close to Jerusalem represented by an archeological dig down through ten thousand years of cities stacked one on top of each other through the ages).
A common thread through these books is the unbelievably nasty and deprived behavior of people in power. As I have been reading these books I have been have been making an assumption that these horrible events, and many others such as Bush's attacking Iraq, Hilter and Mussolini's actions during WWII, Japan's actions during WWII, our historical and current treatment of the "Indians" in America, and on and on into history are the result of apparently unstoppable insanity, greed and the thirst for power.
In the middle of these readings I came across one of those "spiritual" postings that find their way into my email. I normally ignore them, but this one caught my eye because it posited that maybe our understanding that successful people got that way because of greed and a thirst for power, and that they are necessarily "bad" people because of that greed and power hunger. We seem to believe that in order to be hyper-successful you need to climb on top of others and to do that you need to be greedy - which is therefore "obviously" a "bad" thing, maybe even evil. The thought in the spiritual email was that maybe the judgment of them being "bad" because they are successful, and obviously greedy as proven by their great success, is in our minds and does not represent reality. Maybe that concept is saying something more about us than about them, and maybe it isn't a useful concept to cling to. I am willing to entertain that as an interesting point to consider.
This morning as I was reading about Harad and the treatment of the Jews, as well as the Romans and Greeks and all those old dead guys a phrase came to mind by a contemporary guy in power. The phrase is "I am the decider." It is not very elegant, but maybe it is naive and simple enough to capture the nature of the problem. President Bush seemed to have truly believed that he was in the position of being the decider, and as such maybe he was forced to make all sorts of decisions that might not be so popular with those lucky enough to not be the deciders. Maybe there is something about being in the position of being the decider that perverts our ability to find compassion, fairness, truth or justice. Maybe some of us are wired in such a way that when in that position we come to believe that our decisions come from a place where they are by definition they are fair, the best for the people, the best for the world, necessary and justified. Since they have nobody else to rely upon they have to rely upon themselves, and since they know they are have very little to go by, they feel that their direction comes from somewhere outside, from God or something like that. At that point they lose their moral anchor and come to depend upon an inner voice instead of the voice of others.
Maybe Bush's statement that he is the decider wasn't making a claim of power, but it was a simple description of the situation. Maybe it was more of a plea for help than a statement of power.
I haven't spent a lot of time puzzling this out, but I am entertaining it as an idea to be mulled over. Possibly the problem is that some people are incapable of acting rationally when in a place where they are depended upon to be the decider. Maybe people in general fall apart at that point. Maybe the only way to prevent the deprivations that they keep forcing upon the world is to design social systems that don't place people in that position. Maybe it isn't greed, a thirst for power, insanity or any of those things, maybe it is just what happens to people when they find themselves in the position of having to make final decisions based upon their own instincts and where they can't "share the blame."
Just a thought - maybe not worth anything.
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