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Calling All Grown-Ups
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 Arthur Koestler told the story of an old priest he
met during World War II. Fascinated that the man had listened to thousands
of confessions and heard  countless
intimate secrets, he asked him what he had learned about human nature.
The priest was naturally reluctant
to discuss the secrets of the confessional, even in the most abstract terms.
Finally, though, he offered one generalization: “Basically, nobody ever
grows up.”
Amen. When my mother died last
June, one of the many emotions that surged through me was an odd feeling
of sheer unreadiness. I wanted to say to her, “Mom! You can’t
die yet! I haven’t finished growing up!”
After all, I was only 51.
Koestler’s priest never met
my mother. She grew up early. I never knew anyone so self-reliant, but so
willing to be relied on by others. Until she died, I didn’t realize how
deeply I felt I still depended on her. That feeling never quite goes away.
One of the fascinating things
about celebrity scandals is the sudden revelation, repeated over and over
again, that so many famous, powerful, seemingly self-sufficient people have
never grown up. What had been the secrets of the diary are thrown onto the
front page.
After all, adults are supposed to
be making some kind of effort to be responsible and self-sufficient. But
many people don’t even try to grow up anymore. The low birth rate in
modern society suggests that they would rather be children than have them.
And the growth of the welfare state is an index of how constantly we are
being invited to let others take responsibility for us.
Why do we talk about
“responsibility” in government, when government itself has
become a device for shirking and concealing responsibility? The more
prosperous we become, the more we hear about poverty and the alleged
necessity for the state to take care of those who have been
“forgotten” or “left out.” You’d think that
life were tougher for us than for our ancestors on the farm.
![[Breaker quote for Calling All Grown-Ups: Giving the inner child the franchise]](2005breakers/050524.gif) As
the state relieves us of
responsibility to our parents and children, it increases our responsibilities to
itself. You may divorce your spouse, desert (or abort) your children and
abandon your parents, but your duty to pay taxes is absolute. There is no
divorce or separation from the welfare state, till death do you part (and
even then, inheritance taxes will eat up much of your legacy).
Maybe you don’t have to
support the children you’ve begotten, but you’re going to
support other people’s children, and pay their way through college,
from coast to coast. The natural ratio of responsibility is askew.
The socialist phenomenon, as Igor
Shafarevich has called it, takes many forms and many names. But it’s
a phenomenon of rich societies, not poor ones.
Poor societies can’t afford
to support a large parasite class; the great majority of people are doomed by
necessity to be hard-working peasants. When you have to produce food for
your family with your own hands, refusing to take responsibility is not an
option.
It’s when a society
produces a huge surplus of wealth that the parasites multiply and become a
powerful force, demanding to be supported and exaggerating their hardships,
while politicians, feeling their pain, cater tenderly to their
“needs.” Always at someone else’s expense, of course.
The fewer the peasants, the more the parasites.
Not coincidentally, rich societies
also produce large surpluses of leisured theoreticians to provide rationales
for those who won’t grow up. A large part of the parasite class is
dedicated to “education,” a luxury that should be privately paid
for, though typically advertised as a necessity that must be subsidized. This
is why so many intellectuals are on the side of “the poor,” which
in practice always turns out to mean the state.
Frédéric Bastiat
wrote that government is “organized plunder.” It might be
added that a politics geared to this kind of government is organized whining.
I suppose we all have an
“inner child,” a whiner and shirker to the end. Nothing wrong
with that. But it was one thing to lower the voting age to 18; it’s
another to extend the franchise to the inner child.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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