Playwright David Mamet has a great piece in the Village Voice talking about his recent political conversion. I realized a lot of the same things in the past few years when I went through the same kind of conversion.
This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.
But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.
And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
Read the whole thing, it’s great.
UPDATE: Good follow up on the fallout from this article here at the Australian.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Donna // Mar 12, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I have to digest this article some more. I both enjoyed it and was disturbed by it, but my first reaction was “Uh oh, here we go again. Someone else has gotten older and realized the error of his ways and has now become a conservative.”
My second reaction was “Hey Mamet, welcome to the real world.” The fact that Mamet was born in 1947 and has only recently started examining his beliefs is sad. There were glaring contradictions among the many views that he held and expressed in this essay.
I also want to point out that identifying oneself as liberal doesn’t mean that one believes that “everything is always wrong,” and “brain-dead” may describe some but not all of any political stripe. I’d separate the “brain-dead” part from the “liberal” part of Mamet here. I found many of the views that Mamet ascribed to being liberal as very idiosyncratic to him.
But I do agree with him that idealism has to be tempered with reality — especially the reality that more government isn’t the solution to all (even most) problems and that people can get together among themselves and “work it out.” But isn’t this is exactly what Obama is saying?
2 pax // Mar 12, 2008 at 3:48 pm
If you ask me, being liberal means that you think everything is fucked up and you want the government to do something about it. Being conservative means that you think everything is fucked up but that the only thing the government can do about it is make things worse.
If you think people are good at heart, as liberals do, then you think giving those good-hearted people power over their fellow man will work out well. If you think people are not good at heart, you realize that giving them power will only result in misery.
In my opinion, believing that people are good at heart and that the government can indeed fix things qualifies as brain-dead.
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