Quite simple really. We PRETEND to be the Good Samaritan while continuing along our private little “roads to success” like the Levites we are. We pass laws requiring that people carry health insurance (again we can thank John Calvin—this time for imbuing us with the tortured notion that punishment is a form of love for one’s fellow man since it cleanses our sinful nature). We produce scandalously deceptive commercials in which Montel Williams shills for a Big Pharma front called the PPA and leaves viewers with the impression that the major drug companies are going from community to community dispensing free prescription medication (when in reality the PPA merely provides information on public and private assistance available to the uninsured). We push for medical savings accounts. We shift the costs to those with insurance by raising premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. We shout down those who decry the obscene state of health care in the wealthiest nation in the world by telling them to quit whining about “entitlements” and to move to France if they hate America so much.

In the 18th Century Rousseau recognized that the ruling class was enforcing a grossly one-sided social contract which ensured that they maintained their wealth and power. Little has changed, even in the “land of the free.” How peculiar that we profess to be a nation of Christians yet tenaciously cling to a system that ensures extremely polarized socioeconomic strata, causes suffering for billions of sentient creatures and violates nearly every principle for which Christ was martyred.

Perhaps the most telling sign of our shattered moral compass is that many of the millions of US Americans who are finally recognizing that the United States is a brutish monster have stampeded to support a libertarian reactionary from Texas. While Ron Paul is principled and courageous in his stances against the establishment’s murderous foreign policy, he remains wedded to the libertarian ideals which rest on the deluded infantilism of hyper-individualism.

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in homeless shelters. Libertarianism is simply a rather transparent guise for the myopic selfishness and naked greed that accompany our obsession with “me first and only.” To justify maintaining their negative rights under the social contract while minimizing or eliminating positive rights (which actually place a burden of responsibility upon all of us–and this very jejune bunch is apparently incapable of accepting such a load), they attack laws and regulations that “threaten” the “free” market and the use of public monies to provide for the well-being of society as a whole.

Some of the more rabid libertarian “thinkers” such as F.A. Hayek went so far as to remind the poor and working class to thank their oppressors and exploiters for their very existence.

“The proletariat which capitalism can be said to have ‘created’ was thus not a proportion of the population which would have existed without it and which it had degraded to a lower level; it was an additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism provided.”

Or in other words, forget about a living wage, safe working conditions, or reasonable hours, you miserable ingrates. Without us, you would not have been born. Bend over and say thank you!

Once presented with the glaringly obvious moral and practical deficiencies of libertarianism, capitalism, and hyper-individualism (each of which we have been conditioned to embrace as “normal,” healthy, and inevitable), most decent human beings recoil in horror. Objectively, we want to be the Good Samaritan, but have been dogmatically trained to be the Levite.

While most of us aren’t evil by nature, the psychic disfigurement caused by our dedication to hyper-individualism manifests itself in some very ugly ways. However, we have the power to regurgitate the intellectual manure we have been digesting since birth and focus our time, energy, thoughts and actions to honoring the social contract as Rousseau prescribed:

“Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”

It’s time to abandon the childish notion that it is “all about me.” The world is in flames, in large part because of us. We need to be Samaritans, not Levites.

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