"We, Not I"

"There's no such thing as society."

Those words were famously uttered by Margaret Thatcher, the first prime minister of Great Britain, who, during her time in office, used the power of government (which would not exist in the first place if there were truly no such thing as society) to destroy the individual lives of many in order to enhance the individual pleasure of a few.  As Ronald Reagan did shortly thereafter here in the U.S., she justified the sheer magnitude of her cruelty on the grounds that the rights of the individual to do whatever he or she wants are always paramount.  Always.  Unless, of course, you need to boost your popularity by fighting the splendid little war here or there (see:  Grenada, the Falkland Islands).

But then, except for the occasional war, why have a government at all?  If there's no such thing as society, why not just return to the days of our most primitive ancestors, where everybody did nothing but kill each other for the sake of short-term survival?  It might actually solve a lot of problems.  Aside from eliminating a lot of the administrative overhead for services we take for granted (police, fire fighters, schools, hospitals, emergency weather services, etc.), and therefore the need to pay any taxes at all for them, it might also help to reduce a lot of modern problems--overpopulation, pollution, and the steady gaze of an entire world at their cell phones.  Above all, no taxes--for there would be no government that would need them for support.

Taxes, as Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, are the price we pay for a civilized society.  When Margaret Thatcher was attempting to deny the existence of society, the thing she was really trying to attack was government, and the taxes that support it.  Because, with both of those things, all of us are better off, whether we want to admit it or not.  Thatcher had her own self-interested reasons for not wanting to admit it.  Like most of her peers in Britain's Conservative Party, and the then-Reagan wing of the Republican Party, what she really wanted was a world that catered not to all individuals--i.e., "society"--but the handful of people who suffered (then and now) from the same blinkered form of narcissism that currently resides in the White House.

Lately, though, at least a few of them are re-thinking their position.  Here's one example.

Last year, former Fox News anchor Eric Bolling lost his son to an accidental overdose of opioids.  You can read about it in some detail here.  Although the article doesn't go into extensive detail about what happened, there's enough in it to surmise that nothing had taken place which would have led Bolling or his wife to think that their son was in any danger.  The news hit both of them with stunning suddenness.

It should go without saying that Bolling's loss demands our sympathy and support for their loss and their overwhelming grief.  But it's almost impossible to overlook the fact that Bolling was, up to the point of his son's death, someone who, like his employer, disdained thinking about human suffering in the aggregate, and failed to see that individual tragedies can occur at a rate that ultimately demands that we think about their impact on all of us.  In saying this, I am not making argumentum ad hominem; I am simply reflecting on Bolling's own words in assessing the way forward from his loss. They are as follows:

Not-my-kid syndrome is a killer. Because you just don’t know. It could very well be your kid. So do us all a favor. Do yourself a favor. Do your family a favor. Do your children a favor. Have the discussion with them and do it again. And again. Get involved in your kids lives. …You could save a life.  (emphasis added)

Bingo.

The Reagan-Thatcher era has been all about not only a denial of "society," but a denial of any collective responsibility to help individuals in need.  Far easier to say it's someone else's problem.  Far easier to push away the person who begs you for help.  Far easier to claim a false sense of superiority in the process.  Far easier to overlook the reality that all of us, not matter where or how we are situated, are vulnerable to the changing, churning world around us.  Including the people whose lives collide with each other, often without any concern for the impacts of those collisions.

Arthur Miller, the American playwright who did more to speak about our social obligations than any other dramatist in our country's history, understood this very well.  His first major success on Broadway, "All My Sons," is precisely about those obligations.  A defense contractor sells faulty engine parties for military planes, justifying his crime by the need to keep open his business and take care of his family.  He later learns that one of his sons, who had dissappeared and was thought to be lost in action, actually committed suicide because of his anger over his father's perfidy.  It is in that moment that the father realizes that all of the men killed by the faulty engine parts were, in fact, "all my sons."

Former New York Yankee Bob Watson understands those obligations as well, refusing to accept a life-prolonging kidney from one of his children because he wants them to be able to live their life to the fullest.  As for Watson himself, it's enough for him to have had, as he put it, "a real good life."  I'm not a huge fan of sports metaphors, but I'm enough of a baseball fan to see how it illustrates the need in life for all of us to strike a balance between the needs of the many versus the needs of the few, or the one.  (And, of course, "Star Trek" illustrates it as well; I'm enough of an ST fan to see that and share the previous link.)

So consider the case of Dallas Green, who took over as manager of the underperforming Philadelphia Phillies during the 1979 season.  Green, who had played for the Phillies and was working in the team's front office at the time he took over, saw a locker room full of players more concerned with their individual statistics than they were about winning or losing games.  His response was to post a sign in the clubhouse that contained a simple message, one that Green drilled into the Phillies for the rest of the season and the one that followed:  "We, Not I."  As for the results of that message, it's enough to point out that, in 1980, the Phillies won their first World Series in the team's history.

But Green's story does not end there.  After the 1980 season, he was hired away by the Chicago Cubs, operating under new ownership.  In this case, Green was taking over a team with far less individual talent than he had to work with in Philadelphia.  In this case, Green saw the need to build up the confidence of the individual players, so that he could lay a foundation for making the types of trades and free-agent signings that would be needed to make the Cubs contenders.  So he flipped his message, de-emphasizing "We" while trying to build up the "I" in each player's mental approach to the game.  And the result?  In 1984, the Cubs made the postseason for the first time in nearly 40 years.

My point, ultimately?  It's never always about "We."  It's never always about "I."  Contrary to what Ayn Rand tried to tell the world in "Anthem," both words matter  Human beings are wired for both solitude and connectivity.  We all have areas of our lives which are exclusively ours, and we all have areas of life that we need--I can't emphasize this enough, need--to share with others.  We all have needs that demand individual attention, and needs that can only be addressed on a mass scale, requiring us to be viewed as a unit, not a collection of disassociated individuals.

And we have spend 40 years overdosing on "I."  As a consequence, our country is falling apart--physically, financially, and culturally.  Soon, there may indeed be no such thing as society, because we will have destroyed it, and all of the good things that society creates.

We need to get back in balance.  We, the people of this country, need our own Dallas Green to walk into the national locker room and put up a sign that says "We, Not I."  Time is short.  And getting shorter all the time.