Dostoyevsky on The Matter with Kansas

“And why are you so firmly and solemnly convinced that only that which is normal and positive, in a word, his well-being, is good for man? Is the reason never deceived about what is beneficial? It is possible that, as well as loving his own welfare, man is fond of suffering, even passionately fond of it...I am sure that man will never renounce the suffering that comes of ruin and chaos. Why, suffering is the one and only source of knowledge.”

You, like me, may often wonder why USA voters – and others – do things like vote for politicians who want to take away poor people's health care, or to ask the obscenely rich to pay less tax, or to remove environmental protections against corporate predators, or to burden students with insurmountable personal debt, or to subordinate women – in a word – to make life more difficult for everyone.

I think Dostoyevsky was on to a major part of the explanation in the above passage.

There are undoubtedly a lot of things that go into the creation of the Big Absurdity, but this need to confront the unknown, agonizing realities has to be central. You see USA people, right here in Dayton, living in some of the most luxurious circumstances the world has ever known who are nonetheless as unhappy, dishonest, murderous, suffering and selfish as anyone ever. They see, with an edge to it, the killing or dispossessing millions of people in Viet-Nam or Iraq or elsewhere, and represent it as just the way life is.

It's not like we don't see the situation. Everybody knows. This richest of the wealthy nations has the highest child-poverty rate? Trickle-down economics? Militarization of local community police? Lowering wages for the 99%? Hospitals, medicine and prisons for outlandish profit? The economist's profession? The academy? Psychiatry? Or take Elie Wiesel being conned out of big bucks by Bernie Madoff – it's basic that you can't con a mark who has no larceny in his own heart. It's not that we don't see. We have to own up to it

It's like in “Crime and Punishment” or “The Scarlet Letter.” I think Churchill's statement that the USA will exhaust every alternative possible before choosing to do the right thing applies generally. There is all this suffering and agonizing falsity until the truth is acknowledged.

This public acknowledgement is seen here negatively as “apologizing for America.” Sen. George McGovern said that the walls of the senate chamber reeked with blood, during his attempt to stop the Viet-Nam war, but we weren't ready. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that the US was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. We had to agonize some more rather than face up and admit it. Almost no one in the Senate now thinks the Viet-Nam war was a good idea, as Jim Webb phrased it not long ago. Very few now think invading Iraq was “a good idea.”

Diane Ravitch's first and most important recommendation for improving education in the USA in her recent book,“The Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools,” is that we provide every pregnant woman with proper prenatal health care. It's obviously true, but the country needs to suffer a whole lot more – teacher degradation and firings, more teaching to tests, more fear and agony, more personal debt, more loss, more humiliation and discipline, more recrimination and ressentiment - before it can confess and possibly choose to do the necessary thing.