Growing up

Like so many middle class white men, I went through an Ayn Rand stage during my late teens and early twenties. It was heady stuff. I was Roark or Galt, the great achiever thwarted by lesser lights and their statist dependency. All one had to do was be free to do what one wanted and success was there to be seized. Taxes and rules were slavery. Why so many of us go through this phase is difficult to know for sure. Idealism sits strong in youth: “if only we adopted X system, the world will be saved. I know it to be TRUTH.” Narcissism of youth is definitely also a factor: “I am great, I can do anything I want” It is no coincidence that one of the founders of the noxious Self Esteem movement was Nathaniel Brandon, one of Ayn Rand’s inner circle. Obviously, there is also something in the culture of living as a middle class white male in the United States which blinkers privileged young men into thinking their success is due solely to their unaided efforts. To think otherwise is to look into a dark chasm of privilege versus disadvantage, which just might bring out a little human sympathy. No red-blooded American male is going to show such softness. I was as arrogant and narcissistic an ass as any Ayn Rand follower. What happens to most, but sadly not all of us, is life. We grow up. As I went out on my own in my twenties I put myself in a position of poverty for most of the time. Now I always had an out – family and family friends, plus my own solid education – but most of the people around me didn’t. It took some time, but I realized when your entire family, your neighbors, your friends, are all poor and weakly educated there is no known way out. Working hard, which most did, simply meant working two or three badly paid jobs just to pay the bills. It didn’t mean getting ahead. There was no help from family, friends, or neighbors as they had neither the money nor the connections to help you. It sucked to be poor. It was even worse, as I often saw, to be poor and black. Gays? Transgender? hidden very deeply in the closet away from their Christian persecutors. I found human beings caught in a web of social and economic relations which were mostly beyond their control. Fuck Ayn Rand. Years later I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation using this concept (NOT originally mine) that there is not only physical capital (money, property), but also social capital (networks and connections), and cultural capital (education, training, skills). Each of these forms of capital is exchangeable. For example, money can buy education, then education links you to specific networks of people. I used the concept to analyze society in a medieval city, but it also helped me understand what I had observed years before when living in Detroit, and other places. If you are poor you have virtually nil physical capital, you are also likely to have minimal cultural capital (perhaps a basic high school education), and you have very limited social capital as your networks and connections are with people as poor and uneducated as you. There is no way out. If you are fairly wealthy your physical capital buys an excellent college education with minimal debt. That education – cultural capital - opens doors through employers seeking graduates of prestigious schools. The same wealth and education provide social capital as your wealthy family and friends make for good networks of opportunity, and your prestigious school adds an alumni network as well. You have it made. The wealthy or middle class person can either recognize that privilege and give back to society, or they can read Ayn Rand and fantasize that they have done it all by themselves, and convince themselves the poor are therefore simply lazy takers. I see students struggling to pay their way through college. I see students without health insurance (or with minimal insurance) struggle to stay healthy enough to finish school. I see students who have to struggle between going to school or taking the time to help their desperately poor family. I see friends everywhere who have barely had a pay raise in a decade, now struggling to pay bills. So I say...tax me more. Just out of simple humanity, simple decency, simple civic responsibility, tax me more, and pay for their health and their education. Even for the Ayn Rand fans.