Great Expectations

Some people have idealized expectations about other people, that people normally help one-another to maintain a stable civilization. Other people have no illusions about human nature’s tendency for survival behavior and expect deception edging toward brutality. Other people have nothing but contempt for everyone else and feel entitled to respect without first earning it. They become angry when strangers don’t fawn and flatter them.

Liberals typically expect people to conform to social rules that govern polite society, such as equality, fairness, honesty, and charity. When they discover this not to be the case, they try to find ways to enforce polite behavior through anti-discrimination laws, government transparency, product labels, taxes for social programs and other methods of behavioral engineering.

Conservatives have no illusions about human behavior. To them, if you choose to engage in behavior without first learning every possible negative outcome and covering your own bases, then it’s your own fault for walking into the situation uninformed.

It’s up to you to pull yourself up by your own “boot straps” and it’s up to your parents to teach you all about it. This is the foundation of a self-regulating free market society; another way of saying “survival of the fittest” or “natural selection.”

Some will even go as far as praising and glorifying unwise behavior, such as buying things you don’t need, a house too expensive, or having more children than you can afford. They will prey upon the weakness of liberal delusional expectations of proper behavior, just to get more ignorant people into situations that will drain the resources of the liberals.

Is it fair to associate liberals and conservatives to these kinds of behaviors? It’s probably too much of a generalization to do so because there are so many people who claim to be one or the other, yet they contradict their claims with inconsistent behavior. One might assign the terms “social” and “anti-social” but which is which?

Which is more dangerous? Being taught to behave in a polite and charitable manner, and being taught to expect that everyone else will behave the same way, or is more dangerous to be taught never to expect human behavior to evolve beyond the bare minimum requirements that keep them from prison?

Do we have a right to punish those who take advantage of the ignorant, punish the system that nurtured ignorant choices, or punish the ignorant?

Those who take advantage of the ignorant are they who sell people what they don’t need; charge hidden fees and lock people into never-ending debt.

The system that nurtures ignorance is an education system that values sports more than academics and values labor skills more than real science, entrepreneurship and self-sustainability. A commercial media system that provides vicarious entertainment that distorts values and pacifies the public.

The ignorant are they who were born of ignorant parents and raised without being taught to survive on their own without the help of the state, church or employer; they who are unprepared when they lost their job which they believed would carry them to retirement and beyond; they who bore children as teenagers and were themselves born to unwed teenage mothers.

The chain of responsibility ends with the ignorant who must now find their way out of their situation, but goes backwards to their parents, then to their working class education system.

Unfortunately, our governments would rather cut the social programs and libraries, and not interfere with an education system that produces a surplus of workers that keeps private sector wages down; while government salaries and wages continue to climb despite the state having a bond rating that is second worst in the nation behind California.