The answer is pretty simple. It can be found in the basic tenet (which is a lie) of communism; “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
You get more stuff by asserting your need. You assert your need by asserting your status as victim. Victims need perpetrators from which the goodies are coerced. And so it’s very simple; if you’re in the business of looting, you go where there is the most wealth to be looted. That’s the U.S.
Lyle
April 29, 2013
Comment to Quote of the day—Bill Maher
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
The other element to it of course is the personality that sees people living well and wants to bring them down purely out of envy and spite. Again; the United States will be its main target.
Misery loves company, and further; misery lends itself to a sense of entitlement. That’s the victimhood game again. It happens in personal relationships almost everywhere. It’s probably in your own house, and it spreads like a virulent disease.
It’s infinitely easier to bring someone else down than to bring yourself up. For one thing, pointing the finger of blame onto someone else is a distraction from your culpability for your own miserable condition. It happens between nations, between cultures within nations, and between “friends”.
Seeing someone else’s success, lusting for it and not understanding it, or not having the patience to archive yourself, can be extremely frustrating. It’s far easier to mentally demonize a successful person or culture or nation, and claim that the success is ill-gotten, or at best the success is the result of dumb luck and therefore is not deserved. That absolves you, and justifies your feelings of envy. Then the hate sets in– a frustrated, envious, agitated, white-hot hatred. Then it’s war.
It may take the better part of a lifetime to build up a fine estate, but it can be brought down in an instant. This is why jihadists are enamored with bombs, and why the Obamatons are enamored with Quantitative Easing.
Solutions? I don’t know. I see two parallel paths– On one hand it is a fact that certain adversaries are total enemies and need to be destroyed. There’s nothing else for it. On the other hand some adversaries can be brought around. We as a country have not been doing a good job of teaching and showing people how our success came about. We’ve been corrupted with Progressivism for a long time and so our message has been mixed at best. We’ve been feeding the hate disease ourselves. That needs to change. I think it is changing, but it may be too little too late.
Wow statement is something so amazingly obvious, or rather should be, that I never actually saw it. I think it was something that I always knew and it’s clearly obvious once it’s pointed out, but I never really saw it before. I think it even goes further. Our natural desire is to get the maximum for the minimum effort. This is the underlying tenet of capitalism. When you try to do something artificial, like “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” you still end up with a capitalistic undercurrent. You want to get all you can for the least effort. This time however, the currency is also need and ability. You have to maximize your “need”, and minimize your “ability”. Victimhood is the “best” way to do it.
If you’re a victim, you need more, and you deserve more from those who have wronged you, but you can also contribute less because you’re a victim and don’t have the strength to contribute what non-victims do, or at least that’s how it seems to be working in society.
Bull’s-eye!
And that explains most of the world’s problems.