Irreconcilable Differences

The past year has been pretty much one long heated debate about....well, everything. The US is at a crossroads of the same epic proportions as other historical debates: taxation without representation, separate but equal, minority rights, globalization, and yes, health care reform.

The fact is that our culture is evolving but there are decisively opposing segments of the population; they are in direct conflict with each other. It's time to take a look at the real issues - and it's not health care.

The fundamental issue is how we view access to basic needs and the role of government in relationship to those needs. Rousseau's (Jean-Jacques not the crazy jungle woman from LOST)Social Contract Theory says that humans originally lived freely in nature alone until the population grew enough that old ways of satisfying needs had to change; people began to live in communities where divisions of labor developed which freed up people's time for leisure and of course they began to make comparisons between themselves.

But Rousseau focused on the invention of private property and the development of social classes, an institution that eventually bred greed and inequality. Therefore, he argued, government was invented to protect people's private interests from those who may choose to violate or confiscate, i.e. a social contract, providing equal protection of all. But Rousseau's reasoning pointed to a darker motivation: "the contract, which claims to be in the interests of everyone equally, is really in the interests of the few who have become stronger and richer as a result of the developments of private property. This is the naturalized social contract, which Rousseau views as responsible for the conflict and competition from which modern society suffers" (see Internet Encyclopedia from University of Tennessee).

So in theory government is really an invention of the strong to maintain their power even though they originally gained power by joining a community to satisfy basic needs. In the American "experiment" of government of, for, and by the people, we have embarked on a series of movements to balance the power between the powerful and the weak; Thomas Jefferson warned of the wrathful "power of the majority".

Every major sociopolitical act has been bred through grassroots movement of someone disaffected, someone without, someone in direct conflict with someone else in power. And although the reasons for someone to be disaffected is for another post, the end result is the same: we are all trying to satisfy our hierarchy of needs that Abraham Maslow discussed. And as our society evolves, we will focus on better ways to efficiently, collectively satisfy those needs.

So the fundamental issue is how to satisfy basic needs and the role of government in that process. The current debate really stems from the fact that our society, and increasingly the world, functions with commodities to be exchanged - but the base of exchange sits in the seat of power with the ones who can exchange, not those who can not exchange. Our irreconcilable differences are because there are segments of the population who view health care as a luxury commodity, not as a basic need. Maslow argued that health and safety are second only to food and shelter!

The role of American government has faced the lack of representation and equal rights of citizens, and developed safety nets for disadvantaged in terms of basic needs, such as food stamps, subsidized housing, and safety within our societal borders, yet there is severe riling up over opening access to another basic need.

The issue is not whether government should be equalizing power to access need satisfaction because clearly government was created to protect and balance power among all members of a community when surviving alone was no longer feasible. The issue is whether the community has evolved enough to realize that; only then can we move on.