About ten thousand years ago, folks started farming as a survival strategy. Why move around chasing ripening food stuffs which may not even be there, risking travel hazards, predators and extinction through clan starvation? Some brilliant ancestors figured out that seeds could grow food right by the hut and this food could be stored to provide food all year. C’mon that’s brilliant.
So now you need to store the food. So now roaming bands may raid your stored food, so you need to be able to defend it. Now you need to share the food fairly, as clans had always shared food fairly. So you need administrators. Now the chief has administrators and soldiers to keep the clan alive. Not to enrich himself and his buddies, but to KEEP THE CLAN ALIVE.
That’s the Deal: A bunch of us will do the work of producing, while the chief, administrators and soldiers will run things, handle the sharing and protect the people. The Deal is that ‘government’ will do those things which allow the rest of us to live decent lives in peace. ALIVE, DECENT, AND IN PEACE.
When a government fails to keep citizens alive, in decent conditions and at peace, then that government has broken their end of the Deal. The Deal is off. People recognize this and may shove their pitchforks up the pale, flabby arses of the elite. Of course, it’s more complex than that, but that’s the bottom-line Deal, and deep down we all know it.
Stalin starved to death millions of Ukranian farmers who opposed him and we say he is responsible for ‘killing millions” of “his own people.” Mao’s policies resulted in the death of perhaps tens of millions of his citizens and we say he is responsible for those deaths. Yet I cannot find an instance of Stalin personally killing anyone (he had subordinates do it) and Mao did not want to kill those Chinese people, it was a result of dumbass policies.
Are leaders responsible for sending death squads to kill citizens directly? Yes, obviously. Are leaders responsible for FAILING TO ACT, resulting in deaths of citizens? Well, are they responsible? You didn’t push the toddler into the river, but did you turn away and walk on by because it wasn’t your kid?
Right now we are undergoing a forced global social experiment. The heat has been turned up on the elite in each nation and the scum is rising to the surface. This will be a good thing if the elite take an honest look at how they have fulfilled the Deal and make reforms as needed.
When I first heard of the virus back in February, I said, “This will expose each nation’s health care system for what it is.” A nation’s health care system is a barometer of the leaders level of concern for all it’s citizens. How are we doing? How could we do better?
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