The DIK (Doe I Know) was born in Austria during the Hitler regime. She understands what always happens in authoritarian states. She scrounged for food in Vienna amid the desperate rubble in the aftermath of one.
Malnutrition twisted her bones and transformed her mind. She knows how rabbits can grow too excited by strong leaders and simple answers, knows how many of them can die when that mad intoxication fuelled by hate lingers in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
This last weekend before the American election, the authoritarian intoxication is on full display in that benighted country whose painful decline is clear for the world to see.
A virus is killing more Americans nearly every day than anywhere else in the world. Nearly every day, the infection rate in that country is the world’s highest.
The authoritarian in charge is alternately denying the virus’ presence, calling it a hoax to hurt him, even though he himself caught it; or now with exquisite cruelty blaming virus deaths on those who are fighting to save lives at great risk to themselves, the doctors and nurses and other medical staff, who, says the great leader, want more deaths because they profit from them.
And this leader continues to garner support from 43% of the population.
Even a humble Authorial Rabbit cannot shy away from, cannot be silent at, the immensity of the horror of such leadership, of such a creature masquerading as a responsible being. But it is perhaps the horror of support for such a being that is the most stupifying fact of a terrible time.
Scapegoating is the speciality of authoritarian monsters, and finding the most undeserving victims their special skill. But watching the happy sycophants and toadies rush to deliver the fatal blows under such direction chills the soul and engenders despair for our species.
We must pray for America to awaken from its madness.
Timothy Snyder, eminent global scholar and inspired teacher of the physiognomy of tyranny, recognizes the horror well: as a historian he has studied it thoroughly and described it most cogently. In his current article in The Atlantic, he focuses rightly on the place of healthcare or the absence of it, as a prime tool of the authoritarian mindset.
In post-war Austria, an excellent universal health care system was erected from the knowledge of how fragile life is and how unfree people are without it. The DIK knows Austria’s healthcare system and praises it. Indeed, Professor Snyder mentions he is in Vienna as he writes and is ill and how access to healthcare for him is immediate and effective and how liberating, how freeing, such a system is.
It has been the American way to deny such freedom, labeling it socialism, labeling as socialism or communism the providing of a social safety net for all citizens. This embedded nonsense has poisoned America and is destroying it from within.
When a country does not or does not desire to provide all its citizens with basic security — decent wages, healthcare, education, respect, dignity — it cannot stand.
A fine article in BBC Travel on the concept of samfundssind in Denmark gives the lie to this American delusion. Samfundssind is “social mindedness,” the idea of collective well-being, everyone being concerned for the well-being of everyone in a country, in fact, rating collective well-being higher than individual well-being.
It is not a pernicious undermining of freedom to care for your neighbours, all neighbours. It is the central Christian principle. It is the central principle of all genuine spiritual paths.
Where a country practices samfundssind, as Denmark does, the measure of happiness in the country is high. Trust is high. And the country consequently functions well on all levels, including the commercial.
Where trust is low, as the AR has expounded in a previous blog, countries do not function well. America is not functioning well. It has functioned better in the past, during times of higher trust, of greater samfundssind. It can do so again, identifying where it can improve, taking action, celebrating its best features.
The AR hopes America will again trust in itself, continue its great project of improving life for all its citizens and displaying a model to the world.
J. B. Thompson 