This is an incredibly powerful speech by one of America's most beloved, courageous, and wise Elders, Bill Moyers. This message from the heart of a lifetime of doing the work of growing wise, and of dedicating his lifetime to the highest good, also combines the wisdom of Jared Diamond and of Joseph Campbell, who Bill interviewed for their outstanding series decades ago. We indeed can save ourselves and each other and come to experience that "I am in your family tree and you are in mine." In this process of awakening and remembering what we have forgotten, we will save the soul of democracy. Bless us all ~ Molly
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Saving the soul of democracy
BY BILL MOYERS
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| Democracy Awakening protest in Washington, DC, on April 28, 2016. (Credit: cool revolution, Flickr / CC 2.0) |
The
following is a condensed version of a speech that Bill Moyers delivered
at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, on July 8, 2016,
and is crossposted at TomDispatch.com. (Please note that I have further condensed this excellent speech. - Molly)
The Truth of Your Life
Which
brings us back to those Marshall housewives — to all those who simply
can’t see beyond their own prerogatives and so narrowly define
membership in democracy to include only people like themselves.
How
would I help them recoup their sanity, come home to democracy and help
build the sort of moral compact embodied in the preamble to the
Constitution, that declaration of America’s intent and identity?
First, I’d do my best to remind them that societies can die of too much inequality.
Second, I’d give them copies of anthropologist Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed to
remind them that we are not immune. Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for
describing how the damage humans have inflicted on their environment has
historically led to the decline of civilizations. In the process, he
vividly depicts how elites repeatedly isolate and delude themselves
until it’s too late. How, extracting wealth from commoners, they remain
well fed while everyone else is slowly starving until, in the end, even
they (or their offspring) become casualties of their own privilege. Any
society, it turns out, contains a built-in blueprint for failure if
elites insulate themselves endlessly from the consequences of their
decisions.
Third,
I’d discuss the real meaning of “sacrifice and bliss” with them. That
was the title of the fourth episode of my PBS series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.In
that episode, Campbell and I discussed the influence on him of the
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that the will to
live is the fundamental reality of human nature. So he puzzled about why
some people override it and give up their lives for others.
“Can
this happen?” Campbell asked. “That what we normally think of as the
first law of nature, namely self-preservation, is suddenly dissolved.
What creates that breakthrough when we put another’s well-being ahead of
our own?” He then told me of an incident that took place near his home
in Hawaii, up in the heights where the trade winds from the north come
rushing through a great ridge of mountains. People go there to
experience the force of nature, to let their hair be blown in the winds —
and sometimes to commit suicide.
One
day, two policemen were driving up that road when, just beyond the
railing, they saw a young man about to jump. One of the policemen bolted
from the car and grabbed the fellow just as he was stepping off the
ledge. His momentum threatened to carry both of them over the cliff, but
the policeman refused to let go. Somehow he held on long enough for his
partner to arrive and pull the two of them to safety. When a newspaper
reporter asked, “Why didn’t you let go? You would have been killed,” he
answered: “I couldn’t… I couldn’t let go. If I had, I couldn’t have
lived another day of my life.”
Campbell
then added: “Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that
policeman? He had given himself over to death to save a stranger.
Everything else in his life dropped off. His duty to his family, his
duty to his job, his duty to his own career, all of his wishes and hopes
for life, just disappeared.” What mattered was saving that young man,
even at the cost of his own life.
How
can this be, Campbell asked? Schopenhauer’s answer, he said, was that a
psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical
reality, which is that you and the other are two aspects of one life,
and your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience
forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is our
identity and unity with all life.
Sometimes,however
instinctively or consciously, our actions affirm that reality through
some unselfish gesture or personal sacrifice. It happens in marriage, in
parenting, in our relations with the people immediately around us and
in our participation in building a society based on reciprocity.
The
truth of our country isn’t actually so complicated. It’s in the moral
compact implicit in the preamble to our Constitution: We’re all in this
together. We are all one another’s first responders. As the writer
Alberto Rios once put it, “I am in your family tree and you are in
mine.”
I
realize that the command to love our neighbor is one of the hardest of
all religious concepts, but I also recognize that our connection to
others goes to the core of life’s mystery and to the survival of
democracy. When we claim this as the truth of our lives — when we live
as if it’s so — we are threading ourselves into the long train of
history and the fabric of civilization; we are becoming “we, the
people.”
The
religion of inequality — of money and power — has failed us; its gods
are false gods. There is something more essential — more profound — in
the American experience than the hyena’s appetite. Once we recognize and
nurture this, once we honor it, we can reboot democracy and get on with
the work of liberating the country we carry in our hearts.
For the full speech as excerpted for this article, please go here: http://billmoyers.com/story/plutocrats-vs-people/
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