I have been thinking about this for some time, well since yesterday anyway…
I have already presented the concept of the “common good”
which was presented originally by Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle…but one has to understand the basic premise
of their argument…….
To the Greeks, it was only in the Polis, the city, that man could find
his Arete, his excellence and the only place where a man could become
a human being, not a barbarian. They accept and understood that was in
a civil society which they equated with the state, that someone could
become who they are. The emphasis that Plato place on the state wasn’t just
theoretical jibber jabber, it was the emphasis that the Greeks placed on
the State. To engage with the “common good” meant you were improving the
most valuable tool a Greek had, the polis, the city.
To engage with the Polis, that there was no higher goal of the citizen,
wasn’t contested by any Greek…The Greeks engage with and understood
that they were social creatures who needed the state to find their better natures.
the idea of modern rugged individualism or Ayn Rand nonsense wouldn’t have
made any sense to them… the individual cannot survive on their own, we need
the Polis to survive and become even better, find our Arete.
This is a truth that we have lost and if we are to survive, we must recover
that long lost truth… that alone, we cannot survive and we cannot make the
best of who we are…it is only in our engagement with others, in a civil society/state
that we can we make it.
The idea of the “common good” was continued by virtually every single philosopher
since Aristotle……until we reach America in the 1900, where the idea changed
names and became the “public good” but the same theory. It has many different
definitions which is part of the problem with the notion of the “public good”.
You can almost state the “public good” as almost anything and many dangerous
ideas and policies have been done in the name of the “public good” including
the Holocaust and the atomic bomb and IQ45 tax cuts……so one has to be aware of what the
proponent of the “public good” is actually advocating, but the essential nature of
the “public good” must have actions that actually benefit the “public”. As the
sign on America’s wall says, democracy, then we must conduct actions
and policies that benefit its democracy…… not any particular small group like
people who donated to your campaign, or as we call them in my house, bribes…
the “public good” must actually engage and benefit the public, so we include
education and healthcare and social security and Medicare… in other words,
things that are socialistic, as the Greeks knew to be true, we must discover
to be true that the only path to success we can know individually or collectively
must be together, capitalism is not a sustainable ideology and the only path left
is working together and combining our assets and then collectively disposing
of them to benefit the “public good”……….socialism accepts the proposition that
many hands make light work… if we work together and with purpose, we
can solve many, many of the issues that plague us today…….
which leads me to my last point, vision… who among our leaders
have a vision that leads us to some goal or destination? we see the younger
leaders like Kamala Harris trying to create ad hoc decisions, but they
aren’t leading to some overall, comprehensive goal or vision of where we
want to be and where we need to be…It is not enough to fight against global
warming, you must endeavor to fight global warming within some vision of
where we want to be in the future……. the solutions we seek must exist
within some overall plan or destination we want to reach…it is not
enough to create solutions to immigration if we don’t understand immigration
in the context of past, present and future and of where we want to be
in the future.
some goal is needed to create some understanding of what steps we
must take to reach that goal…… even if and especially if the goal is
far into the future…… we must begin to plan not just the next quarter
or to the next election, we must plan 5 or 10 or 20 or a 100 years into
the future. We must engage in the long game of the human race…
for the “public good” demands that we not only focus on the past
and present but on the future and a future where we will not exist…
I am transitory, temporary and you are transitory, temporary… the
polis, society the state will all go on after we die… the society, the state
doesn’t need any one individual, but the individual needs society, the state…
in order to exist, to survive… this is an essential fact of life and we must
think of our goal, our destination in light of the fact that when we die,
we will leave our children and their children, a better life… and that takes
planning, long term planning and thus we need to have a vision, a goal,
a destination for us to reach for and that goal will decide, determine what
steps we must take to reach that goal………who among our leaders have
a long term plan, a vision of what tomorrow will look like? None right now…
and thus, I haven’t found what I am looking for, apologies to U2…….
in our current crop of people seeking to become president……
Kropotkin