You totally missed the point of my suppositional analogy. “If we had no…” Please go back and read it again.
2 Likes
The simplest answer to the opening questing is, “Habit.” I am reminded of a pair of passages from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, in which he argues that ideology requires rote obedience to the letter of the law rather than belief in it:
we must go down on our knees, pray with our lips, etc. [. . . .] For we must make
no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind. As a result,
demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us. [. . . .] Proofs only
convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most
believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along
with it.
In an earlier passage, he writes,
Custom is the whole of equity for the sole reason that it is accepted. This is the mystic basis of its authority. Anyone who tries to bring it back to its first principle destroys it. [. . . .] The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.
Following Pascal, Slavoj Žižek argues in The Sublime Object of Ideology that belief, “far from being an ‘intimate,’ purely mental state, is always materialized in our effective social activity." Hence, “What we call ‘social reality’ is in the last resort an ethical construction; it is supported by a certain as if (we act as if we believe in the almightiness of bureaucracy, as if the President incarnates the Will of the People, as if the Party expresses the objective interest of the working class.” Quoting the above passage from Pascal, he concludes, “It follows, from this constitutively senseless character of the Law, that we must obey it not because it is just, good or even beneficial, but simply because it is the law–this tautology articulates the vicious circle of its authority, the fact that the last foundation of the Law’s authority lies in its process of enunciation.”
While this brief analysis of the “senseless” character of ideology doesn’t answer the material, historical reasons for the United States’ unique position in the developed world as one of the only countries without a public, universal healthcare system, it goes a long way toward explaining the difficulty of dislodging the status quo. What Pascal and Žižek show us is that the answer to the opening post’s question is that we must look toward ideology’s material practice (its “process of enunciation”), and not its many rhetorical twists and turns, in order to understand why its material consequence (the lack of universal healthcare) persists. Perhaps we can best explain the absence of U.S. universal healthcare in the face of public education by pointing to the material effects of both current systems: one system promotes, through physical coercion and repetition, the national ideology and an obedient workforce (as one of Louis Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatuses”), while the other ensures the perpetual impoverishment of the working class and the physiological guarantee of the working class’s supposed “inferiority” to its wealthier counterparts. If we also weigh this complementary pair against the dominance of white supremacy within the white U.S. mindset, and more broadly within its national character (which has never escaped the legacy of genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, and the de facto “New Jim Crow” that persists today), then it is easy to see how all three systems–that is, public education, the current state of healthcare, and white supremacy–reinforce one another.
3 Likes
A friend of mine here needed dental work, which she eventually found a decent price for, but the initial dentist she saw gave her a price high enough that it would have been cheaper for her to fly home to France and get the work done there.
11 Likes
It’s not unusual for Brits to fly to Poland for dental work.
(and apparently, and unsurprisingly, from the US to Mexico)
1 Like
Perhaps America could have a sliding scale - free healthcare during childhood and a diminishing state contribution as people get older, tapering off to zero at around age 25-30. There’s an economic rationale to protect the young, since we don’t know how much a young person will later raise in tax revenues via their labor, and the young don’t have an opportunity to earn money to pay for medical treatment that they might need. The ‘created equal’ concept means that children should have an equal chance at the outset - provision of free basic education for all children, should go in tandem with free healthcare for all children, at least until they’re old enough to start working.
1 Like
The local component of public education in the U.S. is WHY our quality is so low in comparison to other industrialized countries. It’s the ones that hold everyone to an equally high standard that do well, like France or Germany or South Korea. Whereas in the U.S., in some locations teachers are not allowed to teach science, history, even some math that isn’t considered biblical enough.
7 Likes
But why should health care be related to working at all? And why limit it so?
Is it rational to believe that a receptionist who answers the phone, greets people, and hands them papers for $20 an hour deserves to live if she gets hit by a car, but if she had instead gotten a job as a waitress who answers the phone, greets people, and hands them menus for $2 an hour – well, we should just let her die. What morals or ethics are behind that manner of thinking?
We have both the technology to provide medical care and the economic power to do so, at least as well as any other developed country. So it’s not an issue of ‘who do we give it to?’, it’s an issue of ‘who do we withhold it from?’ and more importantly, why.
14 Likes
I reread what you said, Yes the Local control is better and people able to vote with their feet. Find a community that both agrees with you and can support itself. For some it is easy and others, since they want everyone else to pick up the tab will find themselves in a real mess.
The main reason is what we are used to. If “socialist” is a bad word, then obviously it doesn’t apply to what we’ve been doing all our lives. Nothing is more socialistic than military life, but it doesn’t count.
Change is scary. And saying that our values we’ve had all our lives is accusatory, and we fight back.
I never heard this argument before, care to elaborate?
Besides being funded by the state, the military takes care of its members more fully than elsewhere, not only for medical care, but even making sure everybody has food and religion.
2 Likes
I see were you come from, but this is a very hand-waiving definition of socialism.
I’d guess that most people don’t know how to value themselves except in comparison to others. So, people don’t want to admit–or even see–that things are set up to always have someone poor and destitute who can be looked down on.
3 Likes
Yes, because it always has to be someone. (Though I think it’s actually not likely to ever be most people. But the idea that it could be any one of us—because it must be someone—keeps people afraid and locked into thoughts/behavior.)
2 Likes
Many of us do consider the US public school system Soviet-style indoctrination. It has been since the 80’s, at least.
1 Like
What was the change you saw in the 80’s?
3 Likes
14 Likes
I have some serious issues with the changes Reagan made to our public education system but I think this may be the first time I’ve seen someone suggest he was following the Soviet model.
14 Likes
Reaganomics? Right wing takeover of public school boards to force anti-American, non-academic indoctrination? There are so many possible answers!
16 Likes
6 Likes
