Edvard Munch: Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones (1894)

" I'm hoping the arc of our collective experience turns toward enlightenment …"

Last week, I proposed five elements of what I referred to as The Stupidities that seem to be ascendent as we move into our impending NextWorld. These elements terrify me because they seem to reduce our polity's resilience. They amount to increasingly popular fallacies, mis- or dis-representations of our everyday reality. They undermine an individual's ability to agilely navigate together into our future. Gathered together as a common practice, the group engaging in these behaviors damages their abilities and hobbles their societies. As I explained before, those engaging in The Supidities tend to insist that they're certain about what nobody could ever be certain about, often about delusions and fictions. They engage in what The Muse refers to as The Sins of Self-Importance; they are vain and sincerely believe that everything was always actually all about them. They also exhibit a discernable addiction to common Inanities. They seem dependent upon and exclusively informed by unreliable sources that have few compunctions about just making shit up as news.

Another common presence in this mix engaging in The Stupidities seems to be, among a significant portion of the population, a sense of BeingGrudged. Curiously, the wealthiest among us seem to be the cheerleaders of this burgeoning throng. How have the wealthiest been wronged? Their story usually focuses on the inequities of our tax system, which has always been progressive. A progressive tax system levies based upon a person's presumed ability to pay. This means that the wealthiest, who presumably enjoy income much greater than their expenses, get levied at higher percentages than the average peon, who barely manages to make ends meet on their income. This was historically explained as equitable AND unequal since the wealthiest also tend to use more public resources than your average peon. But the wealthiest also have lobbyists and might consent to spend much more than they'd ever pay in taxes trying to avoid paying those taxes. Their story has been that an elitist government had singled them out for unfair treatment. Under Reagan, they floated the idea that they should receive the most significant tax breaks because their resulting excess wealth, they claimed, would trickle down to produce jobs. Their fiction insisted that this mechanism would provide the most efficient investment in the economy's well-being.

After forty years of practice, that story never produced the advertised result. According to the wealthiest, the cure should be to cut taxes further and even cut what had come to be understood as "essential government services." These essentials included guaranteed payments to stabilize the economy: social security, Medicare, affordable health and child care, spare as that had always been. The BeingGrudged insisted that these programs, rather than supporting the economy as a whole, produced what they derisively labeled "welfare queens," which they defined as people who didn't feel the urge to work for their living. According to the BeingGrudged, it was wounding them to support those freeloaders. Freeloaders, including retirees and those with disabilities, were primarily people who either were unable to earn a living or whose living didn't amount to enough to pay their bills, though those the BeingGrudged usually accused them of simply "living beyond their means." The system the BeingGrudged proposed mirrored the plantation system prevalent in the old Antebellum South, when, according to the then popular myth, everyone earned an equitable share by working for beneficient slaveowners either as slaves or as paid employees. They pined after a system populated by complacent peasants and a self-important elite.

Begrudgement always amounts to self-inflicted damage. It seems to be experienced as others taking advantage, but the option to feel begrudged is always a choice. It's a form of victim dance that ultimately takes away the ability of those BeingGrudged to recover from their self-inflicted state. It feeds upon itself. The more the "victim" believes they've been victimized, the more of a victim they become. It becomes an ever-escalating plunge. There is no bottom. Satisfying initial demands only uncovers additional wrongs. In politics, the logical end of BeingGrudged must be the destruction of the polity, which must be characterized as the ultimate victimizer. If social security made a victim out of somebody, it ultimately victimizes everybody and, therefore, should be eliminated and replaced by a rightful elite who paid for their rights by not paying taxes. If we need to be treated equally rather than equitably, nobody should be taxed, and the operations funded by taxation should logically be eliminated. Curiously, the military never seems to qualify as a victimizer of anybody in these scenarios, even though its budget amounts to, by far, the lion's share of federal expenditures.

Every government that chose austerity as its primary means of achieving prosperity has purchased poverty instead. The inequity in the tax system primarily resides in privileged people's heads and could be resolved tomorrow by a small ingestion of generosity and civic pride. Those BeingGrudged insist that benevolence does not qualify as a valid government purpose. The MAGAs hide behind their self-fueled BeingGrudged to accuse no end of pseudo-abusers of victimizing them. They claim their opponents to be socialists and communists while knowing they're not. They use those words because they enflame others to engage in BeingGrudged's self-sabotage with them. Our President-elect leads an army of self-deluders armed with torches and pitchforks storming their own Bastille. They assault themselves first, and there's apparently no bottom to how low they will propose they should go. Nobody's secure as long as their target rests 'in here.' They complain of witch hunts because they engage exclusively in witch hunts: searches for defensible explanations for taking such mean advantage of themselves. I suppose somebody might get richer as a result.

Everybody ends up poorer when a society engages in such widespread BeingGrudged behaviors. It's chickenshit behavior, and everybody knows it. The leaders understand they play with fire but apparently feel immune from its effects. In the short run, they might have proven their assertion. However, their coalition seems to be crumbling as their rhetoric approaches implementation. It's one thing to justify in theory. In practice, self-delusion sometimes becomes the opposite of its assertions. I am fascinated to witness what happens when their zeal starts producing victims. I doubt even the leaders will be as bloodless as their rhetoric suggests. It's different when cutting budgets starts killing innocents. When the cost of cutting taxes includes amputating your own arm, austerity loses much of its charm. Further, these popular fictions tend to turn in a second. It might only take one well-placed incident to turn a generation of self-sabotaging begrudgement. I'm hoping the arc of our collective experience turns toward enlightenment due to the currently proposed debasement. No society can thrive while BeingGrudged.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz