BETWEEN CARROT AND STICK

Political debate in the U.S. and Europe right now seems binary indeed. I cannot relate to words like "Left" and "Alt-Right". The spectrum I see is one with a carrot on one side and a stick on the other. Whether you place carrot or stick left or right is irrelevant. 

The collectivist-victim culture seen among minorities (The Diverse) is definitely carrot-based. In other words, this is a culture (cult?) of bottomless sympathy and reward for dysfunctional behavior. I actually question if there is any conscious thought of remedial outcome from all the proposed or demanded pandering. Too fat? Stay fat and be proud of your coronary bypass. Inebriated on booze or drugs all day? Embrace your brain rot and try to stay on the right side of the double yellow line. Caught driving drunk, robbing a store, mugging someone? Claim your bragging rights as a victim of the White patriarchy.

At the other end of my spectrum is the stick brigade. These folks adore military veterans and try to ignore the inevitable damage caused by killing innocent people for money. They believe that everyone should act as though they were born with a trust fund, even if they are born to impoverished addicted single mothers. They decry the unnecessary governmental expenditures on health care, education and housing for the desperate. Are you an accidental amputee without financial resources? Well, they might answer, learn to get around on your stumps. Are you intellectually impaired? Get a trade somehow (even though we've stopped publicly financing trade schools generally). Are you old and feeble? Try to live as long and unpleasantly as you can, but don't expect anything from us.

Both ends have their intellectual icons. Marx and Hegel on the one end. Rand and Locke on the other. I dare say none of the people whose names are readily dragged into the carrot-stick debate felt they had all the answers like many of their ardent invokers.

I am pretty sure I live in a world filled mostly with people who are neither all carrot nor all stick. The carrot people are perhaps scarier than the stick people strangely. I imagine a world where ultimately billions of people feel they are entitled victims of a White patriarchy that no longer exists. Who the hell will even attempt to fill those black holes of need in a world which will be even more degraded in resources than it is now? The stick people are less fearsome for me as an old man with chronic disease. In fact, they are my best bet should I need euthanizing. The carrot people would attempt to smarm me to death with victim-pity and absolutely no practical easing of my suffering.