Power Before Civility

Quote of the day:
“Power is the very essence, the dynamo of life…. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles, a world where we are always moral and our enemies are always immoral; a world where ‘reconciliation’ means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation.”
--Saul Alinsky

Quote of the day no. 2:
“Saying it’s ‘dog eat dog’ is an insult to dogs.”
--Unknown

Quote of the day no. 3:
“First, [civility] calls on us to sacrifice for others as we travel through life. And, second, it makes the ride tolerable.”
--Stephen L. Carter

Carter’s quote comes from his 1999 book Civility, which examined both the necessity of civility and its steady decline in the age of individualism.

It’s old news that rudeness is all around us. It has become okay with us, and there’s more of it than ever.

Sometimes it is astonishingly nasty. If you doubt that, tune to any right-wing call-in show. It will be just a matter of time before you hear someone who thinks the righteousness of his opinion justifies condescension, insults and even outright lying.

There are two unfortunate things behind this endemic behavior, which we most-frequently witness in our cars as we drive alone and see drivers react to violations of personal space.

One factor is that we now implicitly assume that we go through life alone. It’s me against the world, and there’s danger out there. Someone’s out to get us, rip us off. And it’s that guy in the Lexus trying to get into my lane.

We don’t think about the primacy of our competitive aloneness. We just live it.

The other factor is we seem to buy into “the ends justify the means” thinking (which is a fallacy). This leads to the assumption that the only thing that matters is our rightness, or our specialness. Nothing and no one else matters, so what happens to them is of little real consequence to us.

That we live this way seems a plain and straightforward truth. We know it’s not right, but we still live this way.

Increasingly.

Why?