Way back in high school, one of the things I remember from English was the sin of using ‘I’ in writing. It could be a reasonable rule, if one were writing an essay about a particular subject removed from the author, there would be no need for the pronoun. 20 years later I had my first college English course, where I learned ‘I’ was encouraged. Well, it wasn’t really encouraged, we weren’t supposed to have papers peppered with the personal pronoun, but if it were necessary there was nothing really wrong with it. One of the other things I learned was alliteration. Not sure why it stuck, but two sentences ago I used a lot of words beginning with ‘p’. It could be it is only alliteration when used in poetry, but any deep meaning of the term didn’t follow me out of high school.

Why all the fuss about the personal pronoun 'I'? Because it has made me conscious about my use of the word whenever I write something, and always when I compose something for these pages it is the same. Not that it really matters, but I think of strange shit like this a lot.

Anyway, the reason I am here again is the reading I’ve done. After finishing What Kind of Nation I realized what it was all about. The title says it all, because in whole it is What Kind of Nation – Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and The Epic Struggle to Create a United States. Most times it’s easy to discern whether a book leans left or right, but this one was harder to figure out because the author lavished so much praise on both men. Praise isn’t the correct term… maybe it would be importance. It’s almost as if the author works hard not to speak ill of either of them. There is a lot of good information, the book goes into detail on a few of the more important cases that went up before the supreme court while Marshall was the chief. He also uses a lot of ink talking about events surrounding the Alien and Sedition Acts, a sore spot from our history any reasonable person would have to be contrite about.

Now it’s a book by Allan Bloom called The Closing of the American Mind. I’ve listened to this one before, but got little out of it because I couldn’t concentrate on it. This was due partly because I was in school at the time, and partly because of a lack of interest in general. I’m doing my best to concentrate on it this time though. He talks a lot of old western philosophers and political theorists like Kant, Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes, as well as ancients like Aristotle. It spurred me to look up some of this stuff on Gutenberg. Whenever I go there I am amazed by how easy it has become to find information. Kids with computers on the Internet don’t know what they have. When I was young I had to go to the library to find shit. I know one thing that kept me out of college immediately following high school was a dread of research papers. Pre Internet students had to go through card catalogues and request stacks of periodicals from musty storage areas to find ammunition for papers. Now colleges make available for free Nexus and services that let students look up periodicals from a terminal. Not only will the computer look through titles, but locate search strings within the articles themselves. If it’s not in electronic format, chances are it doesn’t get used by students, because there is just too much shit that is available electronically.

Ok, back on track, I go to Gutenberg and look some of this shit up. I had no idea the Rousseau wrote a series of books called Confessions. He endeavors to write an autobiography, one with no embellishments or omissions. I looked it up on Amazon, in paperback it is 720 pages. Anyway, I was looking for some of the stuff Bloom refers to that gives us our ideas on rights and property. The way I see it, there are two extremes of thought – those that think everything should be equal, and those that feel society stems from an individualistic ideal. That may not be the best way to put that, but it’s the best I can come up with on the spur of the moment. With the first notion, a potato belongs to the whole community equally. This of course is an absurd notion, because a community of hundreds would have a hard time dividing a single potato. The solution is that the community as a whole works together to grow enough potatoes for everyone, with everyone having a right to a fair share of the crop. A government is needed in such a situation to ensure everything is fair – that everyone does a share amount of work, and that everyone gets a fair amount of the produce.

With the second notion the potato is acquired by individuals by any means necessary, and a government ensures that the means are available to everyone. A first glance at both these scenarios shows fundamentals agreed on by anyone. What isn’t normally contemplated is the reason a governing body is necessary in the first place. It is interesting to me that during all the political debate now and that has ever gone on, it is rare to find this question addressed. To me that it is necessary is obvious, because inherent in the basic human character are flaws that rule when reason deserts individuals. I would like to think that this isn’t discussed because it is understood by all, but in reality it is not the case. Things like this people are loathe to talk about, and now that I think about it this itself is a basic character flaw. It is absurd to think there can be any discussion of it, in an effort to alleviate the problem and thus the need for governance in the first place, again because these same flaws get in the way. Should they be labeled flaws? I guess a nice way to justify it would be to assume that it is individual needs that get in the way. That is the way it is justified today, but it is just a cop out to avoid the fact that human beings are by nature flawed and unable to live in a society where everything is reasonable and just.

Part of what got me thinking like this was Thomas Paine. I started reading Common Sense, an essay in which he discusses the difference between society and government. He starts off by saying that one person on his own can accomplish little, but more than one individual can produce much more than is needed by each individual if they work together, and that this is essential to the survival of all. This is true too, but it doesn’t get to the root of things, the essence of what it is all for. The purpose of a society is not addressed by Paine, in my view he avoids it by assuming that survival is the goal and society is the cure. But is survival really the basic purpose? Paine starts out with one man, who can achieve nothing on his own, but asserts that two men can create a shelter that the one alone couldn’t, and thus provide something they both desire.

His error stems from his male dominated view of society. It is assumed that the goal is survival, and disregards something even more essential, but is inherent in every life form on earth – propagation of the species. What good would the survival of two men be, if there is nobody to take their place? It is just assumed in Common Sense that continuity will take place, and that somehow these men will be able to see to it that it happens. Paine’s purpose wasn’t to explain all this, it was to explain the need for a governing body in society. But fundamentals he got wrong, and therefore some of his assertions will be flawed.

I think he should have started with a family instead of a man. Just a man and woman would suffice. Now the purpose is survival, with the ultimate goal of continuing humankind. Go back to the absurd notion of the potato. A potato and two couples. Can they survive? Of course not. But they can work together to grow more potatoes for both couples. Here’s the essence for what kind of governing body should work in such a situation. What happens if there is not enough food for both couples to survive, or to survive for only a short time? With the first notion that everything is equal, everything is divided equally and all survive for as long as possible. With the second notion, one family gets rid of the other and survives twice as long. At first glance the first would seem more proper, because nobody is hurt. If survival were the only goal that would be fine. But survival alone is not the goal. The goal is continuity, in the form of children, in which case the second notion would be obvious, because in an extreme case where only one couple could survive to produce offspring, one would have to go.

Of course these are ridiculous propositions, but they illustrate the core issue, at least what I think the core issue is, that when you get right down to it, our concepts of what is necessary and what is luxury is skewed because humanity’s basic goal is not understood. This reminds me of one of the Star Trek movies, it was the second or third, in which Spock dies because to save himself he would endanger others. “The needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few, or the one” I think was the line. Years later I thought about that line and how liberal it was idealistically. Digging deeper though the extreme views are clouded. In both scenarios with the two couples, they are both reasonable, the scenarios that is, depending on what the desired end result is. In my opinion, the future of the species, or consideration of such, is the defining truth of how things ought to be, what should be considered foremost when society and political theories are discussed.

I said earlier that basic failings are never discussed in political discourse. This really isn't true though. In fact, it is discussed often, but usually to discuss ways it can be capitalized on by those willing to do so. Machiavelli talks about it a lot, and justifies using the knowledge in extreme ways so long as the end is to achieve that which is good for the state.