Spirit of Organization

Photo credit: Art Spellings

Racists, bigots, hate-mongers, angry mobs, Nazis, stupid: these are only a few of the names that opponents of Obamacare have been called in recent weeks. Such name-calling works on the principle that if you attack the character of the individual or group, then you divert attention away from the logic of their argument and you also evoke the powerful drive we humans posses to preserve our self-dignity. Nobody wants to be thought of as any of these things, so our first impulse is to shut up, which is exactly the desired effect.

Perhaps the most powerful of these personal attacks is the one that says: "You don't love," or its equivalent, "You're not compassionate." While I love Carol King's music and I actually think that her article is one of the best articulated explanations of the pro-public option position that I have come across, I disagree with her and I think her manner of argument illustrates well what I'm talking about. She writes:

"You know the young mother who lives next door. You see her and her children every day. You know she's been laid off, she has cancer, and she's not getting the treatment she needs because she lost her health coverage and can't afford it on her own. This young woman and her children are your neighbors. You're a good, kind, compassionate person. Perhaps you're a person of faith. Are you willing to leave her with no way to get the health care she needs?"

This is a great example of couching the argument in the emotion-laden language of love and compassion. People use the language of love and compassion to entice others into surrendering to the government's encroachment into our lives and absorption of power. When they hear politicians expounding the virtues of their programs as a means of being compassionate, people are emotionally drawn into accepting irrational arguments because they don't want to be seen as lacking in compassion.

What we need to understand, however, is that liberal government programs are not expressions of love at all. In fact, at the very point where love is forced, it becomes oppressive. This is because, by definition, love cannot be coerced. The title of Han Suyin's novel, "Love is a Many Splendored Thing," got it right, but among its most foundational splendors is that it is voluntary. I fear that too many Americans misunderstand that once love is coerced, it ceases to be love.

How can liberal programs envisioned to help the poor possibly be construed as hate? I'm not saying they become hate in motive, but the effect of such policies can be easily proven to be hate-like. To illustrate, consider the question: "What do the following top ten cities (of those with a population of over 250,000) in terms of the number of people living below the poverty level have in common?"

Here are some facts to help you answer that question:

We should remember that these are not cities that have only recently enacted liberal policies to help the needy in the name of love and compassion. They have all been at it for more than 40 years! The results show that their benevolent policies are a miserable failure. They are accomplishing the exact opposite of their stated goals. They have perpetuated a state of dependency and subservience as people owe their "morsel of bread" to the state, rather than to their own individual resourcefulness. Liberalism, instead of being a politic of love, in its effect, is a politic of hate.

When it becomes a government mandate, the effect is neither loving nor compassionate. It becomes a bureaucratic entitlement. It becomes oppressive because different individuals and different groups of individuals define love differently. There is no universal definition of social love that all would agree on. Consequently, government-imposed love forces one vision of love and suppresses all others. That is the very essence of oppression. Philosopher Carl Popper had it right when he wrote: "He who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens the way for those who rule by hate" (Popper, 1966, p. 236). To interpret correctly Popper's words, you must understand that he was writing about the philosophical roots of totalitarianism. When he uses the word "rule," he is talking about political power to enforce one's vision of love.

Love should rule in our hearts and, for the Christian, it is the most basic of all the commandments (Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27). Love can also become the guiding principle among private civic institutions because such institutions tend to have a shared understanding of its meaning for their constituency. But, like Frankenstein's monster, love at the level of federal law, is a sordid caricature that must end in disaster.

It would be bad enough if there were no alternatives for helping those without insurance, but the fact is that many alternatives have been proposed and summarily ignored by Washington because they would require a stepping down of federal power (See my post "America's Shelob"). At this hour when the government wants to expand its power to coerce love and compassion, it would be wise for us to reflect again on these words from Carl Popper:

"We all feel certain that everyone would be happy in the beautiful, the perfect community of our dreams. . . . [But] the attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell."

Sources Cited

Carole King. "No Public Option"? Not an Option." Carole Kings MySpace. August 18, 2009.

U.S. Census Bureau, 2006 American Community Survey, August 2007

Popper, Karl R., The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume II, Hegel and Marx. 1962. Reprint, Princeton University Press, 1971.

Photo by Art Spellings. Compassion (Can Help). 2006.

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