I spent a lot of time on YouTube watching documentaries about the lives of poor US communities and I was shocked to see how the richest country in the world regularly treated its marginalised people. They basically abandon them to charity. The theme that runs through each is the prideful nature of the inhabitants of these hollers and towns that used to be rich with coal and mills but are now crumbling and infested with drug use. I got the impression that such pride is a barrier to getting real help, as well as manifesting a nefarious state supported psychological malady that seems to particularly affect Americans. Apatheia, the Latinate term, means a stoic regard in the face of a hardship, we might call it ‘bucking up’ toward adversity. The town is ruined economically, there is no work or money, the house is crumbling, the truck is using as much oil as it is diesel, and the wife is in shabby clothes, but the inhabitant is proud of themselves and their community. However, the psychological self deals with this, life is tough.
For our American friend, likely an ill educated redneck if any of these videos are anything to go by, the attitude is one where they blame the government for all their woes, and in this they are correct, but they also fail to see that they happen to live in the most lavishly wealthy nation on the globe, one where their entitlements have been eroded to the point where they can get only charity help when the wind blows, or the river carries, their trailer or wooden house down the road. They seem happy that they are Americans, proud of their flag and indifferent to the fact that their extraordinarily wealthy minority has used their government to extract every last morsel of value out of a bulging economy that they have greatly participated in by being the historic workforce of. They don’t feel one bit owed by their state because that would mean they could not be as prideful as they are about being the locus of their own survival. It is an artificial opposing of contribution and entitlement where they, none of the participants of these programs, ever seem to realise that they are not external to the economy in the way that they have been conditioned to think they are.
They vote republican, especially Trump, because he promises to let them go back to back-breaking labour for 65 hours a week digging coal and getting black lungs, all the while their non-working community members have little access to healthcare unless it is charity or debt based. These people are not politically intelligent, they are single focussed on a single goal, their community needs to dig coal to prosper and if it is not digging coal it is decaying. To me, a person who grew up in a less industrialised country, this seems so very limited, but the real woe here is not their attitude toward being useless as a community if they cannot do the one thing that they used to do, it is that they are so accepting of their disenfranchised relationship with their state, the mechanisms of finance (their banking system), and the corporations they allow massive subsidies to (by voting mainstream). They give and give, labour and taxes to the state, and when they need they receive no help from the state.
Again I’ll state it, they voted Trump, they voted to have cuts in their social wellbeing, an erosion of what little free medical care they get now, greater spending on weapons to wage conflicts they will never benefit from, tariffs that will cause their productive industries to grind to a halt or perform mass layoffs, they voted their own path to worse poverty. This is state educated and sponsored pride, stoicism, and it is all persuaded under the banner of being a patriotic American and the psychologically held, demonstrable falsehood, that the US is the best country in the world. It is not in any measurable way the best country in the world, it would have the best constitution of any country in the world if only it’s politicians would follow it, it does not have the best average income per capita, the best life expectancy, inequality has been steadily rising since President Reagan in the 1980s (Gini), etc.
Charity is a bigger problem as far as I am concerned. My socialist view of charity in general is that it is an indication of the failure of a state in mandate to treat its citizenry with a sufficient regard that would allow each person to be guaranteed a minimal level of survival, opportunity, and dignity, and that all charity should be temporary at best. Let’s put my rather harsh view to the side for now and look at who provides for these folks, it is almost always a church based group, made up of wealthier persons from another place who have arrived to rebuild post-disaster using money they have gathered from those wealthier communities they happen to come from. Now at this point you and I may disagree on the positive or negative nature of this intervention, I personally find it a bit disgusting and I’m about to tell you why…
The sought virtue of personally intervening in someone else’s strife, so as to alleviate it, is betrayed by the way those seemingly virtuous intervening persons live their lives, conduct their business, and appeal to their government or state in that a person of means may take any opportunity available to them to actively avoid paying toward the better circumstances of all by being a more moral political actor (voting for more equitable circumstances in their country), and we can suppose that is because they are selfish even if they would not admit to being so, yet actively participate in overt signalling acts of helping those very same persons they had by implications aforementioned avoided helping, as long as it is under the banner of being a good church person and conducted within an act of charity that rewards themselves in the perspective and treatment of their church peer group, and thus bolsters their own idea of self worth. In other words the only reason for their participation, and the only method of its realisation, is that they then have perceived and felt virtue because of it. I see that as more selfish than paying tax, volunteering their time without seeking recognition for themselves their deity or their group, or by making better decisions when casting their vote. A world without the need for charity must be possible, the richest country in the world should be able to lead the way, no?
I’m that sceptical that if I see a person wearing a church T-shirt (logo or bible passage) in one of these programs I immediately think that the help given as charity is secondary to the hope that the deity they worship observes their act, and maybe even becomes tertiary if the prominence of the church and the balance of it’s bank account are also considered. Why not just help, and while helping try to contribute to a fairer system by paying taxes and demanding that they go toward raising the minimum level of every person in society so as to eliminate this sort of poverty. It’s almost as if the risk is that if the need for charity disappeared the opportunity for virtue would disappear right along side it, and then how would churches look like they could be doing enough good to distract from all that hatred and smiting and prejudice they have as foundational pillars? To me a charity perpetuates the problems it is trying to appear to solve, it needs those problems for its own prominence because it would be nothing without them, no charity is working towards its own destruction, charity is the plaything of the rich and the virtue of the selfish.
In conclusion to this post I’m going to put the blame on Liberalism, and I’m only briefly going to say why.. Liberalism is not only the detachment by the state from interfering in the lives of free persons, it is the detachment of the state in responsibility for the care of free persons. Liberalism in this way understood is responsibility of contribution of value toward the state, which is then captured by the wealthy, coupled with an abandonment of the contributor when they are in need, and it makes the US what I see in these films. Remember that when you see the US envoy to the UK, or wherever you are, turning up to start the negotiations. Our normal view of them is built on razzmatazz, not on reality.
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