When I was a teenager, some of my friends and I had an inside joke about the Highlander Series in which a chicken pecked the head off of a highlander and received its power in a massive flash, turning the chicken into fried chicken. Being fond of eating chicken, as well as enjoying the joke about phenomenal powers being granted to poultry, it is a joke I still remember fondly even if few people these days seem to remember the Highlander tale or its mythos.

There is a lesson in my inside joke that does apply, unfortunately, to politics today. A serious problem exists in that many ‘chickens’ have gained great political power by making promises that cannot be kept, and the reckoning that is required both for governments and for their people to recognize that these promises cannot and will not be kept is immensely destructive, since we are essentially living in denial at the present time about the way we go about business.

This is immensely dangerous. To not accept reality is to put one’s self in harms’ way when that reality forcibly intrudes upon our pleasant illusions. For example, right now much of the Western world is under the illusion that it is the responsibility of the government to provide for care of the elderly, or health care for the population at large, or stable retirement income. In reality, government does not properly have these responsibilities, though it has taken them for political profit as well as because our institutions (and not only government) are grossly incompetent across man societies.

In one sense it is tactically sound for governments to grow beyond their level of competence (which, truth be told, is a fairly low level as a general rule). That is because it makes government the source of spoils that can be given out to support companies and people to do what is deemed socially desirable by government, and to reward political supporters and insiders with power and profit. In such a way our economic culture and political culture both suffer corruption, which is a long term disaster but can be extremely profitable in the short term for those who (like most of our society) are nearly entirely short-term minded.

The problem is that chickens come home to roost eventually. Eventually one makes promises that cannot be kept in order to gain support, and when it comes time for those promises to be paid for and there are insufficient resources, such problems become extreme and very dangerous. Somewhere we have to know that we don’t have the resources with an aging population and fewer young people as well as fewer good job opportunities for those young people to provide for the elderly. Somehow we have to know that the same government we don’t trust to govern is incompetent to handle running businesses or choosing which ones prosper, or to handle health care or housing or anything else for that matter. So why would we support government having those responsibilities in the first place if we know, deep down inside, that they can’t do the job? Are we really that stupid?

This is our problem first, and primarily. Do we prefer the truth to pleasant lies, or do we believe the lies that others tell us because we can’t be bothered to take responsibility for ourselves and simply want other people to handle our problems while we only gripe and complain when things go wrong? We have to remember that governments are not divine. All that governments do is done by people; hopefully those people are competent, but we can’t take that for granted. All that governments do requires resources paid for by someone, usually a lot of taxpayers. We may grouse about desiring to increase the tax load on the wealthy, because they can bear it, but 48% of people in the United States pay no taxes at all. In essence, these people are freeloaders who provide nothing and expect free resources. I do not know the percentage in other countries, but I suspect that many countries show a similar pattern. How long can this continue?

It is not yet the time to point fingers. That time will come soon enough. We ought first to look at ourselves. What responsibilities have we failed in? Are we part of families and communities and congregations that do not take care of their own but would rather give that responsibility to government, with greater layers of bureaucracy and less accountability and efficiency and competence? Did we not wish to be bothered with what we have been given to do so we were happy to let someone else handle the burden, only to realize too late that they were unable to do so but happily took our money for all those years anyway?

Whatever government is in power when the emperor is revealed to be naked will probably spectacularly fail. But they will only be the one holding the bag, the one standing when the music stops and there are no more chairs to be found. They will be blamed, but it will not be their fault. There will be a lot of angry people who are themselves partly responsible for the mess for abdicating their own responsibilities for themselves and for others. There are already a lot of people who are hostile toward the government that do not offer alternatives. There are many tasks that government is incompetent to handle, but to trim government to a manageable level where it can do its job requires that we do our jobs too, and not merely look out for our own interests, but those of our families, neighbors, and brethren, and friends. The moment we can do that, we may even (if we are fortunate) prevent the day of reckoning from occurring in the first place, so that there is no blame to be given. If not, the finger we point at government will be three fingers pointing back at us. For leaders come from the people they rule. If they are the best we have, what does that say about us?