Thanks for the help. I've read Ayn Rand. I have a hard time not thinking that it was written tongue in cheek, like a modest proposal.
Let me try to channel my inner tea party member.
I work hard, but I don't get everything I deserve for this hard work, because there are lazy people mooching off me through taxes and other bullshit economic policies put in place by the looters. These lazy people want to enjoy the fruits of my labor. What they need is a fire lit under their asses. If they had to live in fear that they would wind up torn apart by wolves or die of exposure and the flu living in a cardboard box because no one is going to help them at all, then they would stop being lazy and get to work. This is because the world is ultimately just, and in the absence of economic interference, all hard workers will be rewarded with the best our modern technology has to offer. Nobody could ever end up poor despite working hard and being intelligent. The fact that I work so hard, and am reasonably intelligent, but lack an even nicer car and an even nicer place to live than the one I have is the result of lazy people taking my money to fund abortions -not because greedy people are raking in billions of dollars by profiting off a society that has well-educated, healthy, happy people and refusing to pay back into that society in order to keep it that way. I am self righteous. I do the right things, I live the right way, I follow the right rules. Other people don't -and they are the ones that should suffer. They should suffer. I want people to suffer, unless they follow the same damn rules I do. Suffering provides the necessary negative feedback to give us all a kick in the pants when we need it. The world would be a utopia if we all worked as hard as me and stopped trying to get something for nothing. Also, I at least moderately agree with or am not completely offended by the following ideas: Christianity right, other religions are wrong, gayness is wrong, abortions are wrong, many poor people are poor because they are lazy. My ideas may not be politically correct, but I know the difference between right and wrong. If you work hard and don't completely flaunt all morality by being a homo (which is just gross, what the fuck is wrong with you people?) or doing abortions (which kills babies, how is that not clear?) then every thing will work out for you (unless some baby killing homo takes what's yours).
Okay. I think I've done it. The problem is, in order to think this way, I have to shut off my critical analysis facility and become intransigently sure of myself. I have to be completely obsessed with the fact that I deserve more than I have. I can't empathize at all with the poor black woman who has three kids and makes minimum wage and lives in a shitty neighborhood, or with her kids who can't read or write and don't have money for lunch, because she is mooching off of me with her food stamps. She deserves the situation she is in. Her kids deserve it too. Maybe they won't be so lazy and stupid when (if) they grow up because they will learn from their experience that only hard work gets you food. I can't accept the idea that we the people could vote to each pitch in a portion of our income to help those kids out. Only lazy people would think that way. Nor can I accept the idea that they are in an impossible situation, lacking the same opportunities I was given at birth. I have to be completely ungrateful for all that has been given to me and insist that absolutely everything good that has ever happened to me in my life is the result of my deserving it. I deserve everything good that has or will ever happen to me, and everything bad is someone else's fault, because I am one of the good guys. I am on the right team, I believe in the right God, and I am a winner.
Is this right? If so, how do we deal with these people? They think we are the dumb ones who just don't understand how the world works. They think they understand what we are thinking, but that we refuse to see things their way. Unfortunately, I think that thinking in terms of us vs. them and using war metaphors is just playing into their way of thinking. We have to think in terms of Us. WE includes them. We the people. That just sounds so cheesy. Fuck it. They are fucking morons.
