Collectivism is a church, or a grange, or a group of neighbors getting together in living rooms near you talking about political activism or health care.
Tomorrow's story will be about camping, anarchy, and the beauty of Alaska, but today is looking at Memorial Day.
I'm thinking about making a progressively written cookbook published live and unedited on this blogspot site. The idea is to weave the recipes into stories of past adventures, and especially cruise-line shannanigans. So stay tuned.
This year, Memorial Day really seems like the whole weekend because of an e-mail I got from a former math-tutoring student of mine. The cartoons, whose messages were essentially 'thank and remember our veterans, don't just party on memorial day' were very thought provoking. I got this sense that most people think of the military on memorial day, but I'm concerned that everyone thinks of the military in a particular way. I worry that our national consciousness completely accepts the idea that "freedom isn't free," and I believe such rhetoric going unexamined and unquestioned makes us inherently unsafe in our modern world.
Fact is, no one wants to dishonor any veteran. I'd contend, that in an ideal world, we wouldn't even dishonor prisoners, poor people, or Downs Syndrome people, as doing so serves no righteous cause other than inflating our own egos (not that it will necessarily happen, but from what I've studied, I'd say having an In-Group/Out-Group mentality, while functionally helpful to society, is one of the biggest things that holds us back as a species). Since there is no counterbalance to the people who deeply revere veterans (and I don't deny that doing so is worthwhile and moving to many people), Memorial day seems to only speak with that one voice - we don't do enough for the people who wield guns in our name. Left out of the Memorial day message is the voice of all the dead soldiers: "don't send my younger brothers and sisters off to war unless another Hitler is upon us."
What do I mean by all that? Simply this: violence begets violence; honoring soldiers without pushing against the "need" for their slaughter is just another kind of violence and injustice done to the world. Christianity is not my thing, but I seem to remember something in it about "shalt not kill." Yet, people who want to give all their problems to jesus all the time really seem just as ready to let the Flag-bearers blame everything on Saddam, or Iran, or Vietnam and Communism. As far as I can tell, their stated evidence for believing in the "enemy" usually goes no further than television heresay. God even told W. to go and kill people in the name of freedom, and of course he felt obliged to tell his country that god told him so. How many truly religious people would abhor that idea? How long before truly religious people give their piety to a god that doesn't command them to kill and conquer for freedom and country? Not long I hope.
If you take a step back from yourself, it is interesting to look at Collectivism and Individualism and what type of people such societies create. Individualism ascribes a person's priorities automatically into the self-and-related category. As long as we all live by fair laws and wait our turn, all the people in an Individualist country may proceed to consider themselves similar or different from everyone else as they see fit. Given the freedom to make that choice, most people tend to believe they are different from everyone else, since making that cage of uniqueness and cutting yourself off from everybody is cool in the U.S. and being the odd man out is everyone's secret indulgence. Being a sheep is worth deep ridicule in this country, even while our pastures grow denser and denser populated with people unwilling to examine the dischordant values they espouse (like that the ten commandments should be stamped on courthouses where we shalt sentence to kill via lethal injection). I don't claim to hate sheepdom for myself. In fact, I wish more people grazed at the pastures where evolved forage is found - humanity is capable of so much more than instant gratification and entertainment, the crowning achievements of Capitalism.
Whereas all that may apply to Individualist societies such as where we live, Collectivist societies are a different ball game. In a place like China, if you claim a religion makes you different, better, or more special than everyone else, you're given a one-way ticket to jail or worse. Though the punishments and restrictions on such activity may lessen as the execution of such non-collectivist ideas becomes less and less necessary to maintain the status-quo (and since executions tend to cause revolutions), in the end we see that China's entire population, through their ancestry, has been naturally selected to believe the doctrines behind such punishments. Just like the death penalty here, enough people believe with their hearts that the State has a right to take life, that even those who abhor such punishment rarely use the argument that the State should generally not be an agent that takes human lives. That argument simply isn't effective in persuading people here, just as saying the State shouldn't have the right to dictate belief systems isn't an effective argument to persuade people there.
But, a unique strength lies in a Collectivist society that America will have to figure out how to match if we're to avoid being overwhelmed in the future: any Chinese is far more willing to act for the greater good of society as a whole than Americans are. When financial crisis or disease or any other interruption of our daily order arrives, which society do you think will be better able to cope? The society where an individual believes themselves to be roughly equal to everyone else, or a society where any individual courts the notion that they are somehow more important than their neighbors? A society where every day, the citizens vote to support government programs and decisions with their actions, or a society where far more than half the citizens don't care to vote?
Obviously I don't really know what the future will bring and whether our way is better than other ways or not. Obviously, we could end up having more pockets of surviving civilization after world catastrophe hits (here in the place where only the strong have survived in many places for a while now). But, my point is that competition and individualism should have limits. If you buy that then you're less likely to believe it when they tell you that National Health Care is Socialism, and saying such a thing will no longer be sufficient for you to dismiss it out of hat.
