GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – ME or WE?
An underlying, but often unspoken, theme in political debate is the issue of the rights and wants of the individual versus the need to have a cohesive society.
One way to think of it is as a continuum. At one end is the tyranny of the autocratic State in which individuals who seek to assert their individual rights are imprisoned, tortured or killed. At the other end are the extreme Libertarians who believe the rights of the individual are the only thing that matter and we have no responsibility to anyone else but ourselves.
There are of course other ways of thinking about the relationship between the individual and society but, however you imagine it, when we vote at election time it’s something we ought to consciously consider .
Do you want a WE society in which we all pay our fair share to look after one another? Or ME society in which the individual gets maximum freedom of choice and pays as little as possible to the upkeep of the State .
Cartoonists, at their best, often point up the absurdity of some of the things we believe .
Like today’s one on the Libertarian belief that whatever people choose to do or whatever happens to them in life isn’t any of our responsibility.
It raises, yet again, the age old question
“Am I my brother’s keeper?”
While we hear a lot of talk about “rights” these days we don’t hear anywhere near as much about our obligations to each other. Or, to put it another way, the word “duty” is not as common as it was in my parents’ generation, because they acnowledged through the Social Welfare governments the elected that we had a duty of care towards our fellow citizens.
It’s getting colder. Winter is settling in.Tonight some of us will be sleeping in cars and kids are growing up in motel units because rents are so high, wages are low, and there are simply not enough available houses to shelter everyone…
Bryan Bruce is one of New Zealand’s most important and respected documentary makers. His work is available on bryanbruce.substack.com
I would like to live in a “we” society.
Currently our government says we must do this or that for the good of the country while their actions are to ensure that their sponsors are the ” I” that get the cream while the “we” get the skim .
Just need to look at the housing announcements this week.
First home grant gone, money shifted into a vacuum where none of the 1500 places to be funded will be available for 3 years as stated by Tama Potaka yesterday.
Those houses will probably be provided by pseudo social housing providers who are actually developers or investors getting a guaranteed return subsidised by the ” we”.
I know a few libertarians and although I don’t subscribe to their world view, that cartoon doesn’t represent them either.
You’ve just illustrated the talent of a libertarian – perpetual rationalization to validate mass harm when their Sci-Fi utopia never worked anywhere, ever.
Rationalizing…. Blah blah blah Blah blah blah
Blah blah blah …
generally oppose foreign military intervention on anti-imperialist grounds, while right-libertarians also generally oppose foreign military intervention and generally oppose all government foreign aid as well. In the United States, the Libertarian Party opposes strategic alliances …
Deliberate, rationalize some more…
Blah blah blah Blah blah blah
Blah blah blah … THEY ASKED FOR IT.
” Oh shit look at all the dead people ! ”
Little F# Up Dave:
” Quick look over there, a kid needing a school lunch.
Not on my watch. “
I literally have no idea what you’re talking about.
Maybe because I’m not a libertarian.
But then I doubt the author of this piece knows what one is either
I see Dunedin has a growing tent city
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018938629/dunedin-s-homeless-and-rough-sleepers-erect-growing-tent-encampment
Jesus Christ, where do these people get the money to buy tents???????? /s
Unfortunately left identity politics is me, me, me.
It’s funny you say this because identity politics was a right wing invention.
It’s unfortunate to see leftists fall into the idpol trap for sure, but this kind of thing happens when a bunch of elites re-order the economy, and people get conditioned into individualism.
The contemporary left decides it needs to pander to individualist extremism in the social realm, because it hasn’t united behind a coherent counter plan to Neoliberalism in the economic realm.
There needs to be a balance.
On the hand there are rights and entitlements and other the other hand there are duties and responsibilities. For many years now NZ has emphasized the former and ignored the latter.
Are we really all sitting on this continuum with the colonialist state at one end and unrestrained “free market capitalism” at the other?
No, we are not. Since 1984 people have lost faith in the New Zealand state. The New Zealand Labour Party saw to that, as much as National or ACT. They also have all the evidence they need that the effects of global capitalism, under the guise of “free markets”, are no better than the depredations of the colonialist state.
Collective or communal thinking will return from its true place of origin, in the hearts and the formal or informal institutions of the people. It will come from nga tangata motu.
Spot on . The de-alignment with these past decades models of Government will happen here in NZ too.
The SHAM perpetuated on people is already reaching its day of reckoning.