So, I watched a bit of "SiCKO" earlier tonight. I
like Michael Moore. I don't know what it is, but I think he makes interesting and effective films. Sure, it's a tad overdramatic, and you can tell he's not going for statistical accuracy or real evidentiary standards with his anecdotes, but I'll be damned if he's not very effective in getting his message across.
By the end of it, something had solidified for me, something that had been cooking in the back of my brain for a bit. The for-profit model of society has to go the way of the dinosaur --
buried in the earth by God to trick us into thinking it really existed extinct. The idea that the desire for profit drives innovation is plainly false -- consider that a sizable amount of important research is done at academic institutions. All the desire for profit drives is people to engage in activity principally directed at making money.
In the end, what results is a system where those behaviors that tend to produce more profit (e.g., we create a job whose sole purpose is to find ways to deny people necessary medical procedures because it's good for "the bottom line") are the behaviors that are "rewarded." We don't laud people who make important humanitarian contributions. Well, we might pay lip service to their "tireless work" or whatever, but it's not like we truly appreciate what they do. "It's a nice thing," we say, "but we could never do it! Think of how much money we'd lose!"
And the saddest part is that we really don't have to be wage slaves. Right now, my career choices are limited by where I can actually make enough money to support myself after having spent three years in law school without a job. That's hardly fair. If I weren't beholden to the system in place, I might practice my profession free of the desire to make money, as long as I could ensure that certain basic material needs were met. If it weren't for the desire to have enough money to afford both necessities and luxuries (like, you know,
books or a television or a computer) I could feel free taking a job that is vital to the functioning of society.
Instead, if I want to make money as a lawyer, I have to defend those same companies I was complaining about above. I have to go in, with a straight face, and say, "the denial of service was valid because a reasonably prudent person, exercising due care..."
It's
crap. And it's crap because of the system. And the system is crap because it rewards greed, avarice, and underhanded, cutthroat paly. This ties back in to my post earlier about the type of people who actively seek power generally being those least suited to the assumption of power. Consider two scenarios -- a baseball team and a large university student government election.
In the first case, the team will generally choose a captain on the basis of a limited set of criteria -- how people perform during games, the ability to inspire good playing in others, etc. The leader is chosen on
merit. He or she might not want the position, but will be chosen because he or she is the best suited.
In the second case, the person self-selects. He or she might be doing it for resumé padding, or because it is expected, or any other number of reasons unrelated to performance. And strictly speaking, the demand for proficiency in performance is low. Most political positions call for actually a very small amount of leadership and a good deal of posturing. So we end up with someone whose sole desire is for the office for completely selfish reasons... or even worse, someone who wants the power because they want to abuse it.
My point here is that our current highly individualistic, ultracompetitive system tends to produce leaders and workers who are driven by the desire to dominate and control. In short, our liberal society is geared toward producing corporate totalitarianism as its end product.
This crystallizes something that began to form in my mind last quarter when I was doing an in-depth study of critical crimonology (basically, critical theory applied to the philosophy of criminal law) -- capitalist society has got to go. It's not just a nice idea any more; it is a historical necessity that we do away with this form of society. Communistic society is the only morally defensible way of structuring society, at all.
Oh, and
feminism comics for the win.