Though I’m not a fan of the show, Survivor does capture the cynical depression-era politics of my generation (I happen to be a very late cohort Generation Xer) very well.  Alliances are made, recognized to be temporary, and in an atmosphere of intense scarcity the concern is making sure that one isn’t voted off the island.  Even devious trickery may be respected and required when survival is seen to be at stake.  People do not act very generous or self-sacrificial when they view their own dignity and survival at stake because of what they view as the selfishness of others.  I am no different myself.  I too am a prospect of a fierce upbringing in intense scarcity.

It was my hope to be able to, through my love of learning, escape from such a vicious existence of scarcity and privation and find a place in the sun, but my young adulthood has shown me that just as I was fighting and clawing for a good place that all of the sudden all of the life rafts off of the sinking ship of my society were already rapidly filling up.  As cynical and pessimistic a nature as I have, I apparently was too optimistic about what opportunities would be left when it came my turn.  At any rate, looking around I see all the signs of the politics of scarcity all around me, whether I look in foreign countries, in my own family, in the sports realm, or in the political realm.

Why is this so?  Most peace in the political world requires one of two outcomes.  Either there is a compromise where neither side gets all they want but each side gets enough to believe it to be a fair deal.  Neither side is happy, but they are content, and peace is preserved.  The other alternative is for synergistic alternatives that are better for both parties than their initial proposals would be.  In either case, peace requires having a pie to divide with multiple parties or looking out for the best interests of one’s rivals and opponents and seeking their well being as well as your own.  It requires either resources to share that are sufficient for the needs of both and offer a surplus that can be divided or a genuine sense of fellowship with rivals that recognizes a common identity and a common worth and that encourages mutually beneficial solutions.

The current political environment in any realm does not encourage those views.  I will give some examples, but they will all be variations on a theme.  Last year my church had a major schism, which has been discussed at length in this blog, and which I do not wish to go over again at this time.  One of the undiscussed but underlying problems was a fight over what was viewed as scarce resources.  One group of ministers felt that the push to spend more resources on evangelistic efforts was a threat to their own well-being (i.e. salaries and retirement benefits).  In short, they believed there was not enough to go around and spending more money to preach the Gospel meant less money for them.  They did not want to say this, of course, since it sounds selfish, but this was one of the underlying elements of their anger, a concern about losing economic position at a time in their life when they had no better options, unless they wanted to be a greeter at Wal-Mart, and who wants that after having lived a life of power and influence making a solid middle class income?  They didn’t want to get voted off the island, so they tried to make an island of their own, despite the grim arithmetic.

Nor is this an isolated occurrence.  Let us look at the lunacy that passes for politics around the world today.  Greece is a nation that behaved like a grad school student (say, someone like myself…) racking up debt like it was going out of style in the hope that there would be enough good times to pay off the debt and avoid a disastrous outcome.  Unfortunately, that did not prove to be the case either for me (and many thousands of other people in the United States) or for nations like Greece and Italy.  Often the day of reckoning comes when one is not prepared to handle it, and one has to accept that one took a gamble that did not pay off (even when one wishes there had been better options available to take), and that it makes no sense to blame others or seek for others to pay for your mistakes so that you can stagger to the bar again and get drunk and run up too much of a tab.  Both the rioting in Greece and in the #Occupy movement stem from a fundamental inability to accept personal responsibility and a desire to increase resources by pillaging someone else through a bailout.  If one does not go about making resources (and these can be cultural, moral, intellectual, as well as economic), one is only a thief stealing the resources of someone else.

This problem manifests itself in politics as well.  For example, from what I have read, Ohio is facing a vote on an issue of collective bargaining.  In Ohio (and in other places, such as Wisconsin), there has been growing and ugly conflict between those who support public sector unions and those who do not.  Whatever one’s self interest in the matter, the problem is one of division of scarce resources.  In a period where indebtedness is not merely an individual problem for people like myself but a societal curse extending all the way up and down society, the choices facing governments appear to be cutting services (and that means cutting money to entitlement recipients or public sector employees) or raising taxes on private individuals.  Or both.  When there is less to go around, there is fighting over who gets voted off the island and into the nasty and brutal Hobbsian state of nature.

This problem, and I know of no satisfactory solutions to it, is made even worse when the conflict over scarce (or apparently scarce) resources tears at a social fabric of a society.  When that happens, it becomes obvious that scarcity is not the only problem, but rather there is an underlying problem of a lack of trust and unity in the body politic that makes the scarcity only more destructive.  After all, a society can endure great scarcity so long as it looks out for the vulnerable within families and within communities.  But when people start turning on each other and having a hard heart to the sufferings or privation of others around them that they should care about–relatives, friends, neighbors, brethren–then one knows that it is more than economics that is at fault.

And it is that which appears to be a growing problem.  It is not simply that there is not enough for everyone to live the high life that is a problem.  What is a problem is when others think that showing generosity to those who are in dire straits is a direct threat to their own well-being and in refusing their God-given social responsibilities to others.  When that happens, there isn’t even a society left to save, no matter what politicians or parties are in office.  There are only selfish individuals looking out for their own selfish and narrow interests.  At that point, we are in the bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all) [1].  At that point, those of us stuck on the island find ourselves stuck with reruns of Lord of the Flies, or Lost.  And who wants that, or the loss of freedom that results from having to govern such egoists (whether of the left or right) against their consent?  Certainly not I.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellum_omnium_contra_omnes