Holidays are a time of family friends and....high rates of suicide. At some point during the holiday season, someone comes out with the statistic that suicides are up around this time of year because many people feel an acute sense of loneliness or detachment holidays. They see others celebrating with their loved ones and feel left out. The fact that while we may be more aware of it at the moment, our culture has produced an interesting paradox. With cell phones and Internet we have the ability to communicate with each other like never before yet never before have we, as individuals, been so isolated and detached from one another. Families no longer stay close and even the ones that live in the same house barely see one another. We find it difficult to see friends or even our significant other more than a few times a month because everyone is so busy. We may text or even call but a few moments on the phone are no substitute for a few hours in the living room.

In my previous entry I discussed our vanishing privacy. The paradox of our culture is that although very little we do is outside the public domain, we are more isolated than ever. We are rarely alone yet so many people feel an acute loneliness. We have a lot of acquaintances yet few, if any, friends. I referenced George Orwell’s 1984 in my last entry and will do so here because it is relevant for Winston felt this paradox as well. In London he was rarely alone nor did the party desire for people to be alone. After all, everyone is part of the collective. Yet he had no friends and the system made is nearly impossible to have any for there was no one he could trust. In fact, the party discouraged intimate relationships because it viewed them as competition. We have a similar situation today. We once relied on family, community and charity for needs that were beyond our ability to meet as individuals. When a society consists of assertive and capable individuals who meet their own needs and voluntary associations to meet any others, there is little need for the state. The objective of the state, then, is to replace self reliance with reliance on the state and voluntary associations with party and government bureaucracy. The state needs to make the individual helpless and dependant and replace the voluntary associations of community and family with itself. It is the state that provides sustenance, not the individual. It is the state that provides direction and meaning, not religion and it’s attendant associations. It is the state that provides education and guidance for the next generation, not the family. All our meaningful interactions are with the state and not with each other. The dislocation people felt during the industrial revolution provided the perfect opportunity for the state to step in and it was precisely in the mid to late nineteenth century when collectivism and totalitarianism first became valued ideals.

Today, paradoxically, the technological and communication revolution have made total isolation possible. Certainly a cell phone with unlimited minutes is a teen-ager’s dream but by making us accessible 24/7 and thinking we need to be so has helped eliminate our privacy and isolated us from one another. If ninety percent of communication is non verbal, by relying on cell phones we have eliminated true, intimate contact. Take it a step further to e-mail and we have eliminated real contact entirely. We no longer communicate through the intimacy that results from proximity but through digital reproductions of ourselves. The world comes to us through a satellite feed and too often we interact with it as though it’s reality. Is it any wonder that we can sit in our sterile, artificial environments and interact with a world that only comes at us through the manipulated filter of digital reproduction every waking moment and yet feel empty and alone? Deep within every human heart is the desire for meaning and intimacy. If we allow ourselves to be isolated and emasculated by our own technology the state will find it very easy to step in and provide those things for us.

What is missing is this. Within each of us is a spark of the Divine and there are two major components of that spark-creativity and relationship. In order for us to feel fulfilled we need to create and accomplish and we need to cultivate intimate relationships. Most of us work in jobs that are not creative in the least and then we come home and immerse ourselves in the artificial realty sent to us by Hollywood. We all want to do meaningful things yet our culture begs us to work hard to have things and then substitutes television so we can live vicariously through the staged adventures reproduced on our expensive plasma screens. We have little time to go and see our friends and families so we send digital reproductions of ourselves and those that sell us the means to send these reproductions try to convince us that they are worthy substitutes for face to face intimacy. We need more houses with guest rooms and people willing to make the time to use them. We need fewer things and more living. We need to downsize our lifestyle to raise our standard of living. As the new year approaches, perhaps this is a resolution we can make. It may not be great for the economy but in the long run it will be wonderful for us.

     Privacy is an issue on many minds these days. We worry about the security of our most important information because identity theft is so prevalent, Joe the Plumber had his life laid bare before all because he asked a question of a presidential candidate, Sarah Palin had her e-mail hacked into. We are concerned about warrantless wiretaps and the powers of the Patriot Act. Perhaps in the back of our mind runs the movie “Enemy of the State” where the NSA easily pries into the life, and then tries to destroy, Will Smith’s character.   The fact is, Big Brother is watching and there is almost nothing we do that is not known, or could be known, about our lives. Every transaction we make is or can be public knowledge. If you buy gas with a credit card, BB can find out where you travel. When you rent or buy a house, BB knows where. BB knows how much you make and if he chooses, can find out what you spend it on. And it is our spending that tells anyone who’s looking who we are from the foods we like to the books we read to the movies we watch to where we go on vacation. Such information is already available to marketing companies so BB can easily access it. Even your dropping in at the local quick mart to buy a candy bar with cash is recorded on video.   Outside of drug deals and yard sale purchases, private transactions are gone and with it, our liberty. Today, knowledge is power and the more people that have knowledge of our business and lives, the less power we have as individuals.

     How did we get here? We can answer with two names-Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.   The income tax instituted under Wilson enabled the government to know everything it wanted about how we earned a living and established the idea that our money belonged to the government first and we were only allowed to keep the leftovers. FDR gave us Social Security and the Social Security Number without which you can get nothing in this society. That number and a credit score are the passports to the standard of living associated with the middle and upper class in this country and it is just such people of initiative and individualism that are a potential threat to the powers that be.

     Before you assume that I am writing from a bunker while hiding from the black helicopters, bear with me a moment. In 1984 George Orwell correctly pointed out that collectivism is the only secure basis from which to establish and maintain an oligarchy. Since long before 1984, it has been the desire of the liberal Democrat party to establish such an oligarchy and their willingness to pervert the democratic process, pack the unelected courts and bureaucracies with their own and their willingness to do anything to seize and maintain power demonstrate that desire.   Collectivism is the opposite of capitalism and the foundation of capitalism is individualism and the privacy that goes with it. Now you may be thinking that Democrats and liberals are the champions of privacy. They support a women’s right to choose and gay rights and they complain about the Patriot Act. Sure, one can be “serviced” in the Oval Office, run a gay prostitution ring out of one’s home or have innumerable affairs and if you are a Democrat, that is “private”. Play footsies in a public bathroom or send some suggestive e-mails, however, and that is “public”. If you are part of the opposition, the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media have no problem making what most of us consider private, public. Forget the army of lawyers and investigators that descended like vultures on Wassila looking for anything on Sarah Palin. Forget Rathergate, the FBI files found in the Clinton White House, RFK’s wiretaps, Wilson’s jailing of dissidents. Look at what the Ohio democrat officials did to a private citizen who just happened to be playing football with his son when a democrat presidential candidate happened by. If that does not demonstrate the Democrat party’s total disregard for our privacy, I don’t know what does. It is obvious that to a liberal democrat, the “right to privacy” only exists as long as an individual poses no threat. If such relativism doesn’t make us a “Banana Republic”, how are such things defined?     

    How have we fallen so far down this slope? How could we let this happen? Several reasons but they come down to two; convenience and a forfeiture of personal responsibility. Privacy requires responsibility. If we are responsible for our own physical and financial well being and accept the risks and rewards of such responsibility then why do we need the government? Look at Wall Street. Once upon a time investing in stocks and other financial intsruments was the purview of experts and sorcerers who knew the risks and accepted the consequences, good and bad. Most people saved their money, put it into their small business or land or even gold and silver. Banks weren’t even entirely trustworthy. Since 1929, however, we have accepted the idea that the government should eliminate risk to our savings. It began with the FDIC and Social Security and has ended with a Wall Street bailout. The government has eliminated the downside of foolish or risky investing and by doing so has created crises and then stepped into to “save us”, only requiring more regulation, or now, nationalization, and with it our responsibility to know and understand our investments and risks, and our privacy. The end result of this may be the elimination of personal retirement accounts as all the 401K and IRA monies are rolled into Social security. All because we have willingly given up our freedom and responsibility over our finances and with it, our right to the privacy of our transactions.

     One more example. We have given up responsibility for our personal safety. I was recently listening to a debate over what to do to protect students in school from individuals that come in with guns to kill people. (There is a section on school violence in “Memoirs of Former American”) Living in Maryland, I hear the local news from Baltimore, a city with a high murder rate that has experienced a killing spree this fall. Of course there was recently the terrorist attack in India that makes us wonder if such things may soon happen here. When the threat of violence increases, we have two choices. We can take steps to protect ourselves or place that burden on government. If we place it on government, we need to move to towards a police state because with its current resources, government has shown itself to be woefully inadequate at protecting us from muggers, rapists, Mexican gangs and middle eastern terrorists. Except for the last one, law enforcement is often unable, or even worse in the cases of illegal immigrants, unwilling, to prosecute the perpetrators and put them behind bars. Do we really want to make Nancy Pelosi, Barak Obama and all the failed mayors of crime ridden cities responsible for our safety by giving them more money and power? I don’t think so. We need to be allowed to legally protect ourselves. That includes liberal concealed carry laws and self defense laws that don’t prosecute people who do defend themselves against thugs.   Don’t you wonder why you never hear about rampant crime in places like the Mid-west or Alaska? Places where people are, or can be, armed whereas in place like Washington DC, Baltimore or Philadelphia, places with very restrictive gun laws run by liberal Democrat mayors, are shooting galleries? Most criminals are lazy cowards and if they think someone’s armed they will go to greener pastures. In a society where everyone may be armed everyone is polite because no one wants to escalate stupid disagreements. The point is, by giving up responsibility for our personal safety we give the government the right to take a lot more money and freedom and privacy from us in an attempt to make us safe that is doomed to fail because in the end, who is going to keep us safe from them?

     The Founders of this country were smart men. They gave the government very limited power and gave the liberty and responsibility to the people. As long as the people were moral and self-reliant, the system would work. As our moral fiber and rugged individualism become things of the past, government grows and with it, the problems with big, totalitarian governments. It is only by taking responsibility for our own success and failure that we will be able to live free and recover our privacy and in so doing, take power back from government.   

     In case you hadn’t heard, we are in a recession. Job losses continue to mount, the credit crunch is still with us, the government continues to debate how best to throw our money at the problem to make it all go away. During this holiday season they are also encouraging us to behave like them as Fred Thomson so eloquently stated, tongue in cheek. We all know that in our consumer driven economy, the Christmas season makes or breaks a large number of retailers. If sales are good in December, they are in the black. If people are not buying, the red ink spills and with it the lifeblood of our economy.

     A full seventy percent of our economy is based on you and I buying things, most of which we don’t need, things which will most likely be clogging our landfills in a few months. It’s an economy that is based on a house of cards, however. As Mr. Obama, whose understanding of economics normally encompasses socialist fallacies, correctly pointed out, if you and I stop spending a vicious cycle of job losses and decreased spending followed by job losses and decreased spending will result. In a consumer driven economy, if we stop buying as much, business stop producing as much, people get laid off and those people spend less and the cycle repeats until it reaches some stable point. This is nothing new, it’s called the business cycle. Business expands and contracts based on the market forces of supply and demand.

     There are several things that make this time around different, however. One is the nature of our consumption. The expectation of the consumer today is to have the newest and the best of everything. It used to be that having a new car or new furniture or a new television or even a new phone was something that happened once in a while and therefore demand for the new stuff was stable because people had to save for it. Let’s say thirty percent of purchases were new things and most of them were produced here by small businesses. In a downturn those purchases are cut in half to fifteen percent. That hurts but it is not catastrophic.

     Things are different now. Let’s say eighty percent of purchases are new items, it may be more. Easy credit offered by everyone makes these purchases available (and more expensive) to everyone and even though the television you bought two years ago works just fine you are dissatisfied with it because we are conditioned to have the best possible. More credit, more purchases, more credit, more purchases and at some point the credit runs out. People are stretched beyond their ability to repay and begin to default. Credit tightens and purchases slow. Now if we cut new purchases by fifty percent we drop from eighty to forty percent and people that bought new are not going to buy used now because the stuff they have is currently better than used, it’s just not the newest and latest. Easy credit for the purchase of new consumer goods is what brought on the great depression and we are in the same circumstances.

     Had things been able to follow the natural business cycle in 1930, the depression wouldn’t have evolved into the Great Depression. What made that time and this, different, is government involvement. Business doesn’t like uncertainty and FDR and the current congress and administration are introducing a lot of uncertainty. Take the window company in Illinois where the employees sat in to receive wages owed. The company blames Bank of America for refusing to extend their credit to meet payroll. Now as a layman I understand that businesses need credit for some things; expansion, covering the expenses of large, unexpected orders, but weekly payroll? Isn’t that a little like us buying our groceries on our credit card and then blaming the bank for our hunger when we max out the card? If Bank of America looks at this business and doesn’t believe it will get its money bank, it is within its rights not to lend it, or it used to be. Now the government steps in and forces Bank of America to lend because Bank of America was forced to take government bailout money. So look at it this way. The government has taken our money and forced Bank of America to take it and lend it to a business that is not going to be able to pay it back. Does that make any sense to anyone?

     Easy credit and our insatiable desire for new things created the crash of 1929 and 2008. Haphazard government intervention mad the crash of 1929 into the Great Depression. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have learned our lesson. In fact, our consumer driven economy and our attitude toward it and our government will make it much worse. If we truly measure our value by our ability to purchase things then the length we will go to to ensure that ability (and our worth) remains unhindered are frightening. As FDR showed us, the government is more than willing to step in and attempt to ensure our ability and the attempt to do so has demonstrated government’s complete lack of competence in the economic arena. Today, we are even more likely to look to government to solve the problem, to ease whatever suffering we think we have and the current crop of politicians from both parties are more than happy to step in and do what they can. All it costs is our freedom. Is the newest and best really worth it? If you think it is, read a book on the Soviet Union.

Patrick Samuels

www.patricksamuels.com

Author of “Memoirs of a Former American”