Doing an Ike on Fentanyl
and thinking of the bigger issues in modern society
You all know the famous saying of President Eisenhower. He wrote:
Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.
Right now we have President Trump proposing to solve the fentanyl drug problem by applying 25% import duties on Canada and Mexico unless they Do Something.
Obviously, that is not going to solve the fentanyl drug problem in America. Because the question that immediately arises is: why do so many people use opiate drugs?
The direct effect of taking an opiate is the reduction of pain. But it also boosts feelings of pleasure. And opiates are addictive.
Then there are the drugs medically prescribed for reduction of anxiety and depression, like Prozac. Only, of course, they can be addictive too.
In other words, people take drugs in order to reduce anxiety and depression. We talk about people needing mental health care.
But anxiety and depression are probably better understood not as health care issues but as life-screwed-up issues. In my life, I experience anxiety when I have something I need to do but I haven’t done it yet. You could say that anxiety is life sticking you in the ribs telling you to Do Something.
And humans don’t like to Do Something: it’s risky and unpleasant. we mostly want to live day to day doing the same-old-same-old. And we often take advantage of our families and our employers and our government to avoid changing to meet and unwelcome challenge.
And notably, whenever we get a big recession we get a surge in homelessness. Back in the Great Depression of the 1930s they called homeless encampments Hoovervilles.
Now, I believe that in the mechanical and materialistic age that gave us machine textiles and steam power and internal combustion engines, we lost sight of the fact that we are social animals that live by invisible connections to families and relatives and neighbors and people with whom we exchange goods and/or labor.
The market is all very well — indeed it is miraculous — but you can’t have a human relationship with the market. Working for wages is all very well, but your employer doesn’t have the level of obligation towards you that your family does. And then there is debt — so visible in 18th and 19th century novels — and equity. Again, there is no relationship betwen a creditor and a debtor. Just make the payment or go to debtor’s gaol! And then there is government and its spending and taxes where “it’s all about the benjamins,” the money.
In many ways the modern era has been liberating, by freeing people from often oppressive ties to family and to the landowner of olden times. But in many ways the olden time provided protection. Families felt obliged to help their members when out of luck. And there is the famous scene in The Year 1000 where we learn that starving peasants could go to their lord and ask to become a slave, where the slave would work for food supplied by the master.
Today, the obligation to help those in need has been taken over by the state, with its welfare, health care, and pension programs. In Goerge Gilder’s Visible Man he tells the story of a teenage girl who gets pregnant by her boyfriend who was in the Marines. When she gets to be 16 (or 18) she can get welfare and social housing. So she dumps the Marine, the father of her child, and marries the state. Just between you and me, I don’t think that’s a good idea.
This is the point at which I like to bring in Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his distinctions because they illustrate some of the social connections in human society:
Political between friend and enemy
Moral between good and evil
Economic between useful and harmful
Aesthetic between beatutiful and ugly
Recently, I decided to add another distinction:
Communal between included and excluded
where I mean that a member of a community has obligations to other members of the community but not to people outside the community. And here’s some more:
Biological between related and unrelated
Sexual between committed and uncommitted
The fact is that humans feel an obligation and a connection to people they are related to, or in a sexual relation, or in all kinds of ways in which humans connect with one another.
Do you see the point? In the modern era we have rather collapsed everything around the political and the economic. But the political — which is an army in wartime and a government in peacetime — is all about force; the economic is all about buying and selling and producing. There’s a lot more to being human than that.
I think that in the new regime that replaces the unjust rule of the educated class we need to reanimate all the human connections, the distinctions, and especially those that have withered in the Age of the Educated Class.
The Educated Class thought that they were going to transform society from the hierarchy and the rigidity and injustice of the old regime. But I think it is fair to say that while some things have improved — in particular material wellbeing — other things have got worse. And it is clear that a society founded only on politics and the market is a very narrow and limited.
Needless to say, we have not really started to think about this, and how we would help community and obligation and social exchange to flourish once more.