Posted By BillHeise on October 29, 2009

It’s Halloween week, so I thought I’d go back to the previous post in which I note that zombies seem to be everywhere in the culture these days. I’ve been thinking about this a lot (I know, how cool am I?) and here are some of my zombie thoughts.

Zombies are lifeless creatures who come back to life by some freak accident or who are controlled by a bokor, a Voodoo sorcerer (see Wikipedia). My kids love them, because I think that they can kill a hoard of people. “They’re zombies, Dad!” they say when I question the wisdom of mowing down thousands with a sweep of a laser blaster.

Fair enough. We are social creatures who need others to survive. By isolating others as zombies we avoid the effects of injuring others while still giving vent to our basest impulses. My kids are growing up with a strong sense of self, instilled in them by caring parents and teachers, and this means they can afford to kill lifeless others without injuring their mortal souls.

But I have a sinking suspicion that having kids battle undead zombies and vampires gives kids the sense that they are gods in a world without serious opposition and without the need to cooperate with others. It seems to me to get to the heart of the pattern of social isolation that we’ve been seeing growing in America.

Social Isolation

This growing sense of social isolation is cause for concern. and it’s not just me who thinks so. Check out this article, where it says:

Social isolation has been known to contribute to many emotional, behavioral, and physical disorders. These include anxiety, panic attacks, eating disorders, addictions, substance abuse, violent behavior, coronary heart disease, and overall disease.

Of course not everyone who suffers psychological isolation lacks the ability to cooperate with others. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were able to cooperate because they believed that their fellow students had no interior, no other being except in opposition to their godlike selves. In other words, Eric and Dylan looked at their fellow human beings as zombies. The problem is raising a generation does not feel the need to cooperate. It’s my way or the highway, and opposition points of view are suppressed as the inevitable other, the voice of the inhuman. In other words, they are zombies.

Zombies have the disadvantage of spreading like wildfire, but they have the advantage in a political culture like the United States of not existing except protected behind a cover of fiction. The problem with Eric and Dylan was that they dook the zombie games they were playing too literally. All engagements with such undead zombies are subject to the caveat that it’s all in fun and doesn’t mean anything. But when politicians on both the left and right side of the aisle paint their adversaries as zombies to be cut down in their path without any cooperation, then we have a moral imperative to stop them (the politicians, not the zombies).

These politicians are adults! What are we doing raising kids in this generation? We are treating them to a fictional world without consequences in which they can blast away on a crowd of Nazi zombies—my kids showed me this one. What chance do they really have in a world in which compromise, while uncomfortable for the true believers in any cause, is necessary to keep the larger peace?

Living In a Universe of One

In a universe of one, it is okay. We are more than okay. We are gods at war with a race of evil zombies. Our moral duty requires us to kill them. If we don’t, we are no better than the psychopath who haunt your dreams (My dreams are not haunted by anything; thanks for asking).

Living In a Universe of More than One

In a universe of more than one we face competition for scarce resources. But our playgrounds are being emptied of competition from the environment in which I grew up, which was that the most powerful kid on the playground got to distribute resources. On the playgrounds of today, there are no winners and losers. Everything is equal.

And there’s nothing wrong with this. The question is whether we can live with our new, noncompetitive outlook on life as we travel into the 21st century. We have lost, not only our ability to cooperate, we’ve also lost our unique position as the only capitalist country in the world. We now face stiff competition from abroad. The question we’re facing is this: Is America a land dedicated to equality? Or is it a land dedicated to risk taking?

Risk taking by its nature involves an imbalance. No risk, no reward, the saying goes. Those who try may fail, but they may win as well, while those who do not try at all our awarded by remaining at the bottom of the pile.

On the other hand, Americans love equality, and it offends us that so few have gotten so wealthy while so many have gotten left behind. And Reagan’s “rising tide lifts all boats,” while true, is not a very good basis on which to build a social policy. That doesn’t mean, however, that Dick Gephardt was right when he talked about “the winners in life’s lottery.” Such a statement gives credence to the notion that some people win and some lose by the hand of an invisible fate and not by their own guided hand. This is not the case.

These two camps are fighting in America today, and it is one of the reasons the political lines have been drawn so distinctly. Both sides have a different take on what it means to be American, and rather than cooperate, they dig in.

Is it any wonder that kids are playing Nazi zombie games in this environment, an environment towards killing as many of the “others” as we can while saving as many of “us?” You can’t be wrong if you’re just fighting zombies. Human beings, on the other hand, require more tender care.

Who I Am

Now I have no doubt who I am. I am a risk taker. But I understand that I’m in the minority, and that limits my claims on the public’s attention. It’s like the Pareto Principle:

[The Pareto Principle is] also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity, states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. (Wikipedia)

This observation, it seems to me, reflects the state of the rich and poor in America. 20% of the richest pay 80% of the taxes. In 20% of the labor force creates 80% percent of the jobs. Shouldn’t we be focusing our efforts on the few could provide the most jobs?

I’m not advocating for myself here. I’m asking a question. There are no perfect answers to the problems I’ve laid out here if for no other reason than that the world is not a perfect place. Moreover, it never will be. The gain of one sector of the economy means loss in another. Granted, it’s not a zero-sum game. Boosting resources in one area the company will cause the economy to rise. Boosting resources in another area will cause the economy to rise more slowly, or not to rise at all, or even to fall. Failing to prop up the 20% could have dire consequences for the other 80%. Can we answer the question of the balance of resources?

The Statician’s View

Such decisions are made by people who do not have at their center a vision of the individual. Such decisions are made by statisticians. And statisticians do not always have the same rules in mind as individuals. So what are we to do? Are we to give into the inhuman statisticians who paint the canvas with a paintbrush that is indifferent to the costs for individuals? This was what Adam Smith laid out in his work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations which launched us on the capitalist path. He thought that the human component could be reconciled with the statistical component. I suspect (rather strongly) that the two perspectives on life, while both valid, are different and cannot be reconciled.

The Salvation of Nina

Nina Hagen sought maximum freedom and found her way to the West out of the totalitarian control of Eastern Europe. But she ended up realizing that freedom is not the same as the human condition. We need social networks to shore us up. Nina found her salvation in India. And who am I to disagree with someone who is at peace with themselves? The problem is that Nina can stop and be satisfied, but she can only lament that others don’t follow her. They are idiots; she alone has found completion in an incomplete world.

But everyone in the world thinks that they know more than they do and that they are incomplete. This is a function of consciousness. It glosses over the seams in our perception so that we don’t recognize that we have any seams. But, as someone once said, there are more things on earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. The fact of matter is, whether we like it or not, the world does not stop because you or I have stopped.

So there may not be an answer to the problems of wealth and poverty in America. The answer, surely, is not to go about killing our enemies as undead and inhuman zombies without acknowledging them as potential friends on other fronts.

Categories: Economics, Philosophy
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