Reasons are legion, so it’s no secret that the humanist’s choice for president ought be Ralph Nader. His unrefined, rough-hewn visage provides a necessary counterpoint (or alternative) to that oil-slick, Cheshire grinning corporate candidate countenance exemplified in Mitt Romney’s waxen mug. Nader should also be the poor, middle, and perhaps upper middle class choice as well. And why be so classist?
Because greater variance in net worth yields diminishing shared experience, our empathy is in part derived from a shared commonality for our neighbor. Lack of familiarity begets estrangement and eventual alienation. This particular distinction, if it exists, will be conflated by political, religious or other ideological views, and poses a problem for falsifying my hypothesis.
I do have an experiment in mind, and it involves an 80s era movie starring former SNL cast members Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. Remember, this was before Eddie Murphy went around dressed up in morbidly obese person suits, and Dan Aykroyd’s only connection to the paranormal was starring in Ghostbusters and not peddling quadruple diamond distilled vodka bottled in glass replicas of human skulls (this is the same crystal skull ooga booga Steven Spielberg injected into his latest film, Indiana Jones and the Partial Birth Abortion of My Childhood). The movie in mind is Trading Places. It’s about a filthy rich guy and a filthy poor guy trading places. What in math and science often implies elegance, simple in everything else simply means boring and cliche.
Back to my hypothesis. I was inspired by this mediocre movie to consider what happens when the type of person who typically wins the lotto actually wins the lotto. Considering the awardee falls for the lump sum scam, which can still be in the millions, how are they changed? I was told Oprah did something like this on her show a few years ago. What would happen if we took Oprah’s chef, trainer, chauffeur and walk-in closet away from her? Actually, what Oprah did, if I recall, was air the fallout of a homeless guy who was all at once given far more money than he could manage. But let’s say the guy blew only a sustainable amount on sex and drugs and invested the rest in personal wealth multiplication. Would the same or different mundanities monopolize his conscious thought? I predict different. Not to sound too redundant or syllogistic, but it’s reasonable to assume that that which occupies most of our time and energy is that which is most on our mind. Naturally, we’ll be inclined to select for those who also share our preoccupations and select against those who do not. Dialectically speaking, it’s been show through the Internet, cable news and globalization, the more diverse a culture the greater the tendency to fracture or Balkanize into groups as a way of reinforcing one’s beliefs. We notice similar congruency between emotional patterns and mate selection.
Jennifer Egan mentioned this in passing in the recent New York Times Magazine article, The Bipolar Puzzle, as a possible explanation for the increased susceptibility and intensity of some behavioral disorders in children that are highly heritable. The rags to riches chap would drift away from his former circle of influence–his former in-group might resent him for this and suggest he’s a sell-out chump–and find another more attuned to his new worries–yachting license, amassing art, recovering from plastic surgery, gambling on Wall street, whatever. With that in mind, I’m currently culling the literature for research into the effects of awarding large sums of money to habitually destitute individuals and their overlapping social group affiliations over a period of years.
Nader’s pushing for universal health care, reigning in runaway corporate greed through state and federal regulations, ending our oil dependency and so ending our dependency on oil tyrants both foreign and domestic, increased funding for education, decreased funding for war profiteers, saving social security, regulating credit card companies, establishing a “living wage,” exempting an income tax from those making less than 50k annually. These issues, taken as a whole, are salvo for the ever widening economic gulf in America. The underlying principle states that to raise the quality of life for the nations poor and struggling through the help of the wealthiest, with the state and federal government acting as mediator, generates empathy.
It’s not a particularly new or radical policy–federalizing compassion and state-sponsored humanism. Benjamin Franklin liked the idea, at least in theory, but considered big government unhealthy. Living in the shadow of Reaganomics, it would be interesting to hear what Franklin, if alive today, would have to say on topics such as Enron, Wall Street, Bush, Guantanamo, Iraq, and this years presidential campaign.
The other day, editors at the Washington Post told Nader they weren’t covering his campaign because he wasn’t a serious contender for the White House (notice the self-fulfilling prophecy of so-called independent journalists). Nader replied: “Then why are you covering the Nationals?