Of Love,     Bohemians,         Elections. I wrote this short essay for my dear friends who are on intellectual and emotional overdrive these days, and who shower me with all sorts of comments and questions on current events. December 2016

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Find me a form of government where an elite is not controlling the masses.

It is a common feature of all societies, be they primitive or advanced, human or animal, that rule is exercised by an elite. The question with elites is not whether they are good or bad: they are, and will always be. A similar discussion can be had about Nature: is Nature monstrous, or generous; is Nature insensitive, or loving and caring? Nature is -- and does not need our epithets. Since it is impossible to assign a qualification to nature, such as good or bad, or cruel or generous, my bias is to assume good and generous, although I welcome those who believe otherwise. People call me a naive optimist, and I'm happy that way.

Back to government. Once in power, an elite wants to extract a rent from their hard-fought situation of dominance. That tendency is inherited from nature, and there is nothing good or bad in that. A pack of wolves, or a pride of lions, exacts a rent on herbivores; but that ecosystem is remarkably balanced, reaching an equilibrium where none of the parties crosses an invisible set of boundaries. Now enter greed -- that remarkable human invention. Greed is not easy to define; and it does not plague all humans equally: some are almost immune to it, while some are living for and by it. Greed is perhaps an intrinsic by-product of human consciousness, a tendency to define myself as what I have rather than who I am. Nature, on the other hand, is strictly concerned with being rather than having. So in human affairs, greed being what it is, rents always tend to increase. It's a runaway situation that cannot last. Unlike in nature, human affairs are inevitably drawn to a loss of equilibrium. Thus the dynamics of History. Sic transit gloria mundi, as the Romans said.

Now about elections. In light of the above, voting one faction out of power does not solve much, if anything. It perpetuates our mediocre state of affairs called democracy (I agree there were worse systems). The sad truth is that greed pervades all factions. Social democrats and Conservative democrats, aka the Left and the Right, fare identically when it comes to greed. Ironically, each side believes that the other side is evil (a religious attitude, rather than a rational one: you easily detect those militants when any discussion degenerates into insults). A simple test is as follows: if someone harshly judges, or condemns, the faction on the opposite political side, they're just as bad as the ones they condemn. The real immune system of a democracy is made of a handful of good independent women and men.

I was totally candid as a young man. My first realization came after attending a so-called Earth Day, in a beautiful and green park that I loved for its peace and cleanliness, in the seventies in California. One day a huge crowd of fanatics wearing uniforms (blue jeans, tee-shirts) rushed into it, chanting hateful slogans and behaving violently against other uniforms (the Police). After the parade, those affluent kids left the park littered with broken glass, garbage and filth, and probably prolonged the night getting drunk or high. The trash was picked up by other uniformed people -- mostly migrants working for the city. That deplorable scene vaccinated me forever against militants of any shade who do not practice what they preach. It took National Socialism a decade to self-destruct; it took International Socialism seven decades to self-destruct; how long until Universal Socialism wrecks the planet?

I once read a short book by Scott Peck ("People of the Lie") where he tentatively defined evil as laziness. I took it as "laziness to control one's greed", or a failure to keep greed within reasonable bounds (for totally doing away with it is utopia). Of course it can be explained in broader terms as a laziness to love -- a lofty definition with which I wholly agree, but for the present discussion, laziness to control one's greed is sufficient.

Control greed did I say? The only hope is a grassroot transformation of the way we think.

• Religion has taken us only part of the way. It has been our vehicle in centuries past; and it still has a role to play. But partisan religion cannot break through the challenges we face today.
• Politics. The Enlightenment and Democracy have played some role, and modern democracy is a viable approximation of the equilibrium Nature seems to effortlessly achieve. But recent events have shown its limits.
• Science is the realm of systematic doubt. Doubt cannot bring the motivation and vision needed to influence men and society in depth. A Republic of engineers is just as doomed as a Republic of politicians, or a Kingdom of ayatollahs and popes.