David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

This expression of “sympathy,” as in the action of most of contemporary Big Government, is the usurpation by the elected (or appointed) of the rights of others. The judge who forgot the admonition in Proverbs, “Do not favor the rich, neither favor the poor, but do Justice,” who set aside the laws, or who “interpreted” them in a way he considered “more fair,” was, for all his good intentions, robbing the populace of an actual possession (the predictability of the legal codes). He was graciously giving away something which was not his.

“Don’t you care ?” is the admonition implicit in the very visage of the Liberals of my acquaintance on their understanding that I have embraced Conservatism. But the Talmud understood of old that good intentions can lead to evil— vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immediately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and State statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would, in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others.

The literate Jew (or, for that matter, non-Jew) could refer to the very Torah and there find the story of Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, and thus priests. They, overcome by zeal, stole into the sanctuary and burned incense in contravention of the Divine Law, and were consumed by the fire.

They erred, some say, on the side of Devotion, but they erred nonetheless, for they contravened the law, which is both written and derived from an understanding of the Divine, which, though it may be gainsaid by the atheist, is probably understood by him under a different name, that name being “conscience.”

Rabbinical thought holds that all sins are the Sin of the Golden Calf: Moses told the Jews to wait, as he was ascending the mountain to talk with God; the Jews did not wait, but, instead, built a golden image, and worshipped it.

But note that, though we understand their sin, and may accept, indeed, that it is the type of all sin, it was committed while Moses was yet undescended from the mountain, that is, before the Jews even received the Law. That is to say, they held in their heart some conscience, 68some knowledge of the Divine which caused them, on discovery of their act, shame at what they, even uninstructed, understood as a transgression.

All healthy people have a conscience; those born without it are known as psychopaths, and treated, for all our philosophic sophistication, as monsters.

“Don’t you care ?”

Well. I am a Jew, and I am an American, and I am a new-minted Conservative. I care about Justice and suffering, and wonder, as has every sentient being in history, about the disparity in society of wealth and happiness, and about the seemingly inevitable corruption of our representatives, and about the imperfection and apparent injustice of many of our laws.

The revelation, of my latter years, is that all good people care, but that they may be, legitimately, divided as to the means to address and the potential to understand and to correct disparity, sorrow, and injustice.

I have come to see that disparity is inevitable—that there will always be rich and poor—but that disparity need be neither permanent nor systemic, and that programs designed to impose equality of result, though perhaps beautiful in prospect, have weakened every society in which they have been practiced, and lead, eventually, to dictatorship and tyranny. The record shows that those same corrupt or corruptible, which it so say, human, individuals we call “the government,” will, as their power to tax and spend increases, become or pave the way for the accession of monsters.

Government programs of confiscation and redistribution are called the War on Poverty, or the New Deal, or Hope and Change, but that these programs are given lofty names ensures neither that their intentions are lofty, nor that even, if so, they will or could lead to lofty results. 69A clearheaded review of these caring governmental subsidies, whether called welfare, or aid to Africa, or farm subsidies, reveals waste, subvention, and corruption, and tends to the enervation and the ultimate destruction both of the recipients and eventually of those taxed to provide the officeholders with the mantle of “sympathy.” 70

What is “social justice”? It is not merely an oxymoron. It is, inherently, the notion that there is a supergovernmental, superlegal responsibility upon the right-thinking to implement their visions.

But “society” cannot implement visions. It will develop along its own lines, the inherent ethos of the time bringing about, unpredictably, change, according to unfathomable laws, which, when adjudicated according to precedent, become the written laws of the land. 71

The great advances in Justice which have made our country not only great but good are essentially the broadening of its definitions of those worthy of protection. This is the attempt to find justice through equality of opportunity. This is antithetical to that equality of result beloved of the Left; one might have one or the other, but they each are the other’s negation, and one must choose.

I recognized that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to “social justice,” which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of equality of opportunity ; and, further, that so did everyone I knew. Many, I saw, were prepared to pay more taxes, as a form of Charity, which is to say, to hand off to the Government the choice of programs and recipients of their hard-earned money, but no one was prepared to be on the short end of the failed Government programs, however well-intentioned. (For example—one might endorse a program giving to minorities preference in award of government contracts; but, as a business owner, one would fight to get the best possible job under the best possible terms regardless of such a program, and would, in fact, work by all legal and, perhaps by semi–or illegal means to subvert any program that enforced upon the proprietor a bad business decision.) 72

Further, one, in paying the government to relieve him of a feeling of social responsibility, might not be bothered to question what in fact constituted a minority, and whether, in fact, such minority contracts were actually benefiting the minority so enshrined, or were being subverted to shell corporations and straw men. 73

In the waning days of my belief in “Social Justice” I discovered, in short, that I was not living my life according to the principles I professed, that I disbelieved both in the probity and in the mechanical operations of those groups soliciting first my vote and then my money in the name of Justice, and that so did everyone I knew. Those of us untroubled by this disparity, I saw, called ourselves “Liberals.” The others were known as Conservatives.

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SOME PERSONAL HISTORY

My family always put a large premium on the ability to communicate. This is unsurprising as we had, on both sides, and for thousands of years, been stateless wanderers.

My people, the Jews, in addition to being despised as stateless, 74have also been, intermittently, prized for the skills that statelessness created. We have had to acquire knowledge, which is the one possession which cannot be confiscated at the border. We have had to learn languages quickly and we have, for millennia, not only honed those skills through cultural endorsement, but selected for them in our breeding.