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INDIVIDUAL FAILINGS OR A FAILED SYSTEM
02/16/2009
There will always be a debate among people over the cause of societal problems. Are the problems simply the result of individual people making bad decisions, or are they the result of something systemic that needs attention?
The solutions proposed derive from what people believe causes those problems. For Republicans, problems are the result of individual failures and thus they favor allowing individual failures, administering individual punishments, and calling for individual responsibility, while Democrats emphasize the role of systems, the pressure brought to bear on individuals by larger entities, and while not denying the importance of individual responsibility, are willing to embrace solutions that involve changing the environment through government regulations and aid programs.
Poverty is a simple example of a societal problem that Democrats and Republicans look at very differently. Republicans see poverty as an individual failure, a lack of responsibility, a result of moral failing including drug use and laziness. In this mindset, things like welfare, food stamps and unemployment insurance lead to "moral hazard" by reinforcing moral failings.
Democrats see things very differently. While they don't deny the role of drug use and other individual failings among some of the poor (though many wealthy and middle class individuals are addicted to drugs), they see poverty as a trap that people are often born into and stay in because the cards are stacked against them. Either because of the color of their skin, the lack of opportunities including good schooling, substandard housing, poor nutrition and lack of health care, or a combination of all of these, they have very little chance to improve their lot on their own, making a hand up from the government necessary to break the cycle of poverty.
I subscribe to the group that believes in systemic causes of many societal problems. It's not that I don't think individuals are responsible for their behavior. But having worked as a psychotherapist for thirty years, I have seen how individual behavior, especially of those who have little power, is easily influenced, shaped, and reinforced by many outside factors that are bigger than the will of the individual. And so I believe when we search for a solution to both individual and societal problems we must do more than simply demand that people act responsibly. We must look at those societal pressures, failures and shortcomings that make it much harder for individuals to behave as responsibly as we would want them to behave.
Today as we watch the economy in seeming free-fall, we see how forces larger than the individuals who are suffering are causing such enormous hardships. Conservatives who stress the importance of individual responsibility see much of the problem coming from home buyers who bought a home they couldn't afford. These people do bear some responsibility, but they did not bring down this economy. The people who brought down this economy were the people who duped these home buyers, gave out loans foolishly, lured people into taking out complex and terrible loans, as well as those who pushed more loans so they could package them as securities and make millions of dollars in stock transactions, and those who took out insurance betting that this whole mess would fail. So if we insist on blaming individuals, the ones to blame are the ones who had power and influence, not the ones who only wanted to own a home.
A conservative might respond "See, it was the fault of individuals – individual mortgage brokers, individual stock brokers, individual bankers," to which one can only reply that none of this would have happened if the whole system was better regulated, in other words if societal pressures and governmental failures hadn't allowed people to seek only their own advancement and riches by using other people. If we didn't have a system that rewarded greed and punished ignorance, a system that has two sets of rules – one for the poor and the other for the wealthy – our problems would diminish. To give just one example, if the Wall Street bankers, and the mortgage brokers and the securities traders knew they would be punished for the damage they have done to the economy the way the home owners are being punished by losing their homes and in many cases their jobs, perhaps the system would have worked better. In this case, as in many cases, the system was rigged and grossly unfair, set up to reward dishonesty and greed.
The reality is that we live in an enormously complex world, socially, economically, legally, etc. Few individuals can comprehend the implications of every financial transaction they make. Most Americans can't even figure out how their credit card bills get so out of hand, how even if they pay the minimum amount each month and buy nothing new, the balance goes up each month. How could these same Americans, many without a high school diploma, let alone a college education, figure out how the mortgage they were given, with affordable payments, would change in a few years with monthly payments they would be unable to pay?
The people who worked at the corrupt energy company Enron were called the "smartest guys in the room," and the same could be said of the Wall Street guys and mortgage brokers who did what they did because they could get away with it, because no one understood enough about what they were doing and no one was powerful enough to stop them. Government, under eight years of conservative hands-off policies opened the door, turned off the alarm, and allowed these smart guys to rob the bank. Ordinary Americans, struggling to get by, didn't have a chance against these people. And yet, conservatives blame the ordinary Americans.
Conservatives always blame the individual (especially the powerless individual), whether we are discussing torture, abortion, poverty or foreclosure. It is the individual soldier's fault for torturing and humiliating prisoners, even though we actually have memos from Bush administration officials giving legal backing to the use of torture, and we know the president and vice president authorized it. But who is in jail for torturing prisoners? Not the powerful president and vice president, but lowly sergeants and corporals. It was their individual failings, we are told, that must be blamed, not the policies nor the anti-Muslim hysteria of the Bush administration.
Abortion is another problem that is blamed totally on the powerless, the woman who is pregnant. It is never the fault of the man who impregnated her, the husband who beats her and demands submission but threatens her if she becomes pregnant again, nor the fault of a society that will not help her when she cannot feed the children she already has, nor the fault of a stepfather who rapes her, nor the fault of a society that makes women into sexual objects then looks down on them if they become pregnant, and creates insurance policies that provide pills to men to help them perform sexually but deny birth control pills to women.
Poverty, of course, is something that many are born into, with the odds against them ever escaping. Yet instead of blaming slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, discrimination, poor schools, racism, predatory lenders, etc., we blame the individual who is poor, just as we blame the uneducated individual who bought a house he would not be able to afford in five years, rather than the educated lender who deceptively convinced him he could.
We have a system that is rigged against the poor, the powerless, the minority and the woman. We have a society where the rules are set up to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and we blame the poor for being poor. We have a society where the powerful make the rules that keep the voices of the powerless silent, yet we blame the powerless for not changing things. We blame minorities for their undereducated status and crime rates when our system gives them poor education or none at all, crams them into substandard housing, goes to them for access to drugs, and discriminates against them. We pay women 70 cents on the dollar that is paid to men, make them sex objects, and then condemn them when they get pregnant while ignoring the men who take advantage of them and walk away. Then, when in desperation they seek an abortion because we offer them no help, we condemn them as the worst of all human beings.
If we're going to blame people, let's blame the right people – the powerful, the wealthy, the men who use women and throw them away, and the majority that harbors prejudice against those who are not like them. But since changing or blaming one individual will make little difference, why not look at changing the way we do things in the society at large? Why not promote justice, equality, and fairness and put in place regulations and safeguards so that those who might behave badly are neither tempted nor encouraged to do so?
These past two weeks have offered an interesting lesson in why sometimes people focus on the behavior of individuals rather than on the workings of systems. Everyone I spoke to this week was talking about it, the delivery of octuplets by an unmarred woman who conceived them through in vitro fertilization. Everyone was ready to condemn her. Commentators on television, where the story was promoted, saw her as deranged and irresponsible, a modern day harlot who used technology to conceive children out of wedlock. She received death threats from people who were outraged that their tax money might go to pay for her children and the many health problems they will likely have.
But this woman didn't get pregnant by herself. There was a doctor who was willing to take her money and a society that looked the other way as she cried out for attention (having collagen injections in her lips to look like Angelina Jolie, and conceiving six other children by in vitro fertilization) and love. This is obviously a woman who feels so empty and unloved that she would go to extremes to create little people to love her. What is wrong with our society that we would ignore such pain, permit a doctor to perform this procedure over and over again and an insurance company to pay for it?
Yet it is not those who enabled her that are getting the death threats she is getting. The woman is the one we are angry at because she is a symbol, because it is easy to get mad at her. Her story is one that is simple to understand. As complex as the science of in vitro fertilization may be, we have some idea of what happened here and so we have someone to hate.
And the fact is we are angry at this woman because she represents excess, greed, and irresponsibility. She is a symbol. The people we are really angry at are the bankers, stock brokers, mortgage brokers and business moguls who have destoyed our economy, threatened our jobs, homes and health insurance. Nadya Suleman may have been greedy for babies to love her, but we are really angry at the men who were so greedy for our money that they jeopardized our homes, our jobs and our financial futures. We cannot identify one figure to hate, one person who caused all of this. It is something beyond our understanding, and so we direct our hatred against a pitiful woman who managed to game the system to fill a void that she didn't understand. Even though what she and her babies will cost us is a pittance compared to what the big shots have stolen from us, she is an easy target for our pent up rage and fear. In reality, it is an economic system that rewards greed and manipulation and cleverness that deserves our contempt.
Nearly thirty years ago Ronald Regan took advantage of people's fears about inflation and recession and found a scapegoat in black mothers on welfare whom he called "welfare queens driving around in Cadillacs." You don't have to look far to find someone on welfare who can't find a job that pays as much as welfare. You don't have to look far to find people living in poverty and hopelessness and misery who sell drugs or commit petty theft. They are easy targets, but they are only symptoms. It is our society of haves and have-nots that contributes to crime and drug usage and joblessness and disease. It is our society of wealthy men and women who game the system to create even more wealth for themselves that keeps us from being a just and decent society.
But it's so much easier just to blame one single woman who is emotionally empty, or one woman on welfare just trying to get by, or one low income worker wanting to own a home.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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