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My first semester of college coincided with the 2000 presidential election. I started looking at Bush and Gore. Neither impressed me. Correspondingly the major political parties did not either. So I started looking at other options.
As a child born in Regan’s America, in a conservative area of Pennsylvania, I internalized a lot of anti-government sentiments. When I started looking for alternative political parties, the Libertarian party intrigued me. The emphasis on personal autonomy and freedom resonated with my view of the world. Their anti-government positions made sense after years of Republican attacks on the federal government.
One libertarian contention that made sense to me was the unseen costs of government spending. Government spending looked good when you saw an end result like a bridge (that led somewhere). But you could not see was how the money would have been used had it not been taxed. Libertarians ran on the premise that the money was often not used for useful things like bridges and that private actors (individuals, businesses, corporations) would better use the money than the government. There was an unseen cost to the taxes-how the money would have been used in better ways by private actors.
With all the recent attacks on government research spending, I have been thinking about the unseen costs. In a way, the other side of the coin from the libertarian attack on taxes. In the short term, we will not see the impact. We’re riding high with decades of government research spending to make our world a better place. The short-term savings might seem good if you are eyeing giving rich individuals and corporations tax cuts.
The long-term consequences will be in the future and hard to appreciate. Break throughs in medicine will not happen. New technologies and discoveries that will be lucrative will not happen, or at least not happen in the United States. Bright and entrepreneurial people will seek their success in other places.
We cannot see the price we will pay by not making investments, but our futures as individuals and as a country will be less bright. Shortchanging the future makes sense when you have animus towards research institutions, really want tax cuts, and only care about short-term gains. It also makes sense when you don’t care about the future.
It is dangerous to elect a malignant narcissist to the highest office in the country. The Shrinking Trump podcast argues that a malignant narcissist can only destroy. I also have been thinking it might compound the danger if you were to elect a geriatric malignant narcissist. Would he or she be capable of imagining the world existing without the individual in it?
A scene in the television show Community comes to mind. In the third season of the show, the former Spanish instructor, Ben Chang, takes over the community college as a tin-pot dictator. He doesn’t throw himself a military parade for his birthday, but he does instigate a big bash to celebrate his birthday and what he thinks is his ultimate victory over his opponents. As people are fawning over him, a little girl sings this verse, “Chang eats the sun and drinks the skies and they both go with him when he dies.” In his megalomania, Chang appears to eat it up. He probably wishes it were true.
A geriatric malignant narcissist also might struggle with imagining a future where the narcissist is not the center of attention. Instead of leading the country to a strong, bright future, the impulse would be to focus on what meets one’s ego needs in the present. Burn it all down. You won’t bear the consequences. The ensuing chaos almost certainly meets a deep psychological need (at least in some malignant narcissists).
It is lamentable, though. Why I left libertarianism is that I realized it struggles with the common good. If we all act in ways that are best only for ourselves, we have the tragedy of the commons. For all of us to have rights and freedoms, and not be at the mercy of the strongest or people with the fewest scruples, we must surrender some of our autonomy for a greater good.
Funding research is a greater good. It leads to a better understanding of the world. Helps us deal with our biggest problems as individuals and as a society. Creates new opportunities for business. In the TV show Get Smart, Maxwell Smart often lamented something along the lines if only the villain used his or her powers for good instead of evil. In one episode he says, “if only he could have turned his evil genius into…niceness.” Giving geniuses the ability to use their genius for the betterment of the United States (and the world) is better than many other ways we could use the money (or ways we could use their gifts and graces as a society).
Just as government’s role in harm reduction is hard to appreciate and the consequences hard to foresee, the consequences of underfunding research are hard to fully grasp. Consequences there will be. When you are facing a serious health issue, as the climate continues to change, when another country has better AI than the United States, it will be hard to fully appreciate how we created, or did not contain, future miseries and hardships by not investing in the present. The world will go on without the president, but it will be a worse place to be because we have turned our backs on the future.
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