When the Brennan Center first tagged New York as home to "the most dysfunctional legislature in the nation" back in 1994 and others, including many Urban Elephants, the NY Post, and the Empire Center have dissected in various ways since then, is the culture of State politics. But the same dynamics that make Albany a mess are at work in Washington, Wall Street and in every institution, corporation, or enterprise.
With government, outsiders get elected to office and come to the Capitol often with good intentions and some idea of what goes on, but invariably become acculturated to the folk-ways and values of the place and either assimilate and begin to do the same bad things the place is renowned for, or they become outcastes and pariahs.
The sub culture is invisible and often informal, but ubiquitous and all but irresistible. It insinuates its way into hearts and minds like a virus infects the body, and like a virus, it doesn't go away. There are some flashes of insight that occur from time to time among legislators, but that's about all it amounts to, a flash in the pan. I remember Bill Parment, a Democratic Assemblyman from Chautauqua County once said that what went on in the Capitol, to him, often resembled a "criminal enterprise." He didn't resign though.
His comments were not warmly received by Speaker Shelly, largely because he was right. But then, what institutions aren't run that way?
I suspect that Wall Street has more people who admired what Bernie Madoff pulled off than were offended by it. Union leaders everywhere and almost all throughout history have been and are notoriously indifferent to their members real best interests, and would always trade lay-offs for a giant pay hike. Polls show that almost everyone thinks they are corrupt and willing to be criminally corrupt and violent, too.
Religions aren't exempt. The priesthood at some point in time in history became the vocation of choice for pedophiles; and can you name me any other religious "guides," Imams, Rabbis, Reverends or Life-Coaches who aren't more interested in money than miracles? To be sure, they'll always feign interest in the latter, but only to get at the former.
Every organization or business that I ever worked for seemed dysfunctional to me in exactly the same ways that the human mind is dysfunctional. Our psychology is hard wired for greed and self-aggrandizement. We simply hide it from ourselves by calling it ambition.
We even teach our children to think that their lives will never amount to much if they don't become ambitious enough to get into a "good" college, even if the costs are so far beyond their family's means that they have to borrow everything to attend. Whereupon they enter into a small, toxically too-liberal society where cheating is fully acceptable among their peers, and learning is secondary to "finding yourself," expressing your (largely ignorant) self, and consuming as much booze and sex as you possibly can. Our young graduate into the larger society barely as literate as any ordinary high school grad from the 1940s and 50s was, with a burden of debt to carry for years, and little to offer in the way of marketable skills in an economy that no one has any confidence in anymore. Is it any wonder that things are coming a cropper?
Thanks to what passes for values today, we have unimaginably large governments committed to doing everything for everyone and growing larger at all costs, even if they tax to extinction all the sources of prosperity.
Backed by Constitutionally appointed powers, the half-educated half-men who control Leviathan are just smart enough to have devised the means to assure their hold on power in virtual perpetuity. They fixed it so they aren't accountable for their mistakes or the unmistakable failures of their programs. They don't try to measure progress, much less resolve problems. And in the face of what is surely a systemic social failure on all levels and among virtually all institutions, we are faced with serial crises and a widespread loss of confidence. (To think that Jimmy Carter thought it was bad on his watch.)
In fact, it's so bad that putting the bell on the cat's collar can get you hurt, both figuratively and literally. Whistle-blowers are few and far between. But what the hell; let the ugly truth be told again... We have seen the enemy and he is us.
One can only pray that the common sense of the common man is brought to bear soon and we find a way to restructure all the feral institutions, here and abroad, that have already started to eat their young.
The Herd: Have Your Say
