What do we aspire to?

Fortunately, for us in the West, some very bright people have thought about this already and have at least given us a place to start. We (supposedly) strive toward ideals such as "liberty", "justice", "equality", in the US explicitly stated "the pursuit of happiness", "safety", "security", and some form of "well-being". So, if we know what they are and agree what they are, what's this whole discussion about? Good question, but the truth of the matter is we don't agree, neither on the values nor about what they mean.

All of these concepts have been around for a lot longer than any of us who are reading this now. What went through Jefferson's head when he was drafting those concepts into the Declaration of Independence, or what Robespierre had in mind when he was implementing their revolution were very different, though they were both claiming to aspire to the same ideals. Even more different is our idea of these concepts today compared to how they were being used 250 years ago. Liberty applied only to male landowners, and equality was defined in terms of fractions of human beings. It's not that those minds then were misguided, rather it is a simple fact that our understanding has changed. What is different between now and then, though, is that they talked about their understandings, they debated and discussed. And we don't do that much anymore. We say we know and the others have no idea. There is no agreement, no consensus, there is simply an attempted imposition of wills.

Far-fetched? I don't think so. Some of these words don't even mean what we think they mean anymore. Examples? We once thought that habeus corpus was an important right to ensure justice, but the National Defense Act effectively nullified it because you can be arrested and turned over to a military tribunal who is not bound by this ideal. All that's necessary is the suspicion, not proof, of having terrorist intentions (not deeds). Or "equality": we say we're equal but women still only earn 75% of what men do in similar positions; or it's just fine to subsidize Viagra, but not medications that women might have necessary to prevent more serious reproductive problems. And the recent debacle regarding extended health insurance coverage in America speaks volumes about how far we disagree on the notion of "well-being".

So, which of these examples is part of the public dialog? Where are the reasonable discussions and debates taking place that are forming our general consensus regarding these issues? Nowhere. Who has time? Who can worry about those things when you're trying to figure out what to do with your kids between your multiple minimum-wage jobs or when you've managed to finagle an earlier tee time? Exactly. Big-ticket items like what kind of country we want to live in don't even cross our minds. They're not on our list of priorities, so we leave them to the people we hired to do our thinking for us: our elected representatives. And look where that has got us.