Public Service, Public Servants, and Mass Death

August 1, 2008
by Evans Munyemesha

Having read about Obama-care and McCain-care, I can not but be sure that the continued reliance on political institutions and alliances as a viable means to managing healthcare costs and improving healthcare overall is yet only another path to uniting profit, immoral power, and private ambitions with unearned privileges, irresponsible resource management and use, and celebrated idleness.

Some commentators and most public scholars will of course contend that public service and public servants contribute fruitfully to our society just as the scrupulous businessmen, traders, entrepreneurs, etc. do, but it is superfluous of me to enumerate the reasons showing why such a contention is groundless as the common facts speak for themselves. That public service (and public servants) is as productive as commerce in a free market is nothing but a fiction.

Still, I fear that the glorification of such gross and vulgar political beliefs and practices as patriotism, nationalism, and other tribal 'isms,' seen by many as harmless but essential to 'national security' belies how we all are ingeniously tricked into holding fast to the practices of our savage forefathers even after several generations of intellectual instruction and social refinement.

I think that it is significant now, like James Rothenberg does in his article The Problem of Patriotism, to lay bare that which has for so long remained under the thick veil of popular ignorance. It is not in our favor to long to cover it up or strive to overlook it.

It is better to meet it here with an object to rectify it, especially that, for so long as some among us practically recognize the principle that people are made better by the diffusion of information and knowledge by the persistent few, and not by the violence of the majority or through the coercion of the State and its mouthpieces, to remain silent on the matter, to follow a mistaken political expediency in opposition to the express commands of one's conscience, is to aid in the perpetuation of the wrongs of public institutions.

I could not bear to hear the cries and groans of the several millions who are duped, taken advantage of, ordered to submit to, and oppressed by that system of institutions which are looked at as innocent, unoffending, and safe; not because they have been faithfully and rigorously examined, but because their long existence has accustomed the people to regard them as institutions without which they could not do.

These public institutions (or public service agencies as they would prefer to have it) affords an acceptable profession to thousands, if not millions, depending on the size of the government, to those who, for whatever reasons, are not charismatic or persuasive enough to occupy higher ranks in government; or in other instances, serve as an initiation stage into the arts of legalized despotism for those young minds who aspire one day to govern us--- even against our loud protests and well-reasoned arguments.

The profession of public service assures its office bearers a regular source of employment, compensation, and premium benefits, including pensions even though public service as a profession is grossly unproductive. Mothers and fathers are proud that their little boys and girls are being trained in public schools in preparation for the noble cause of serving mankind in public service. It is a joy to these parents that their offspring will do nothing but answer to the higher calling of public service.

Clearly, these parents have not availed themselves of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, an ancient piece of classic writing that made a reasoning man out of me. To many of these parents, the question is: What do they think we are doing while our public servants (their sons and daughters) are busily 'serving' us?

As to wait for a reply from these people is no different than waiting for the Second Coming, I shall answer my own question: Their sons and daughters, the lovely public servants, are plundering us, multiplying the poor among us, and desolating the world. This cruel custom that promotes public service is a custom of power, wealth, and influence; a custom so dreadful and destructive that plunder and public piracy has become a legitimate business by which to live without shame.

Men and women actually vie for these public professions when it is evident to every honest person that these professions are no different than those of brigands. I beg the public servants to pardon me when I assert that the art and conduct of a public servant is not induced by fellow feeling; on the contrary, it is induced by every principle of idleness and immorality.

No one becomes a public servant in order to serve one's country, but to serve oneself. It is pure fantasy to intimate that some people become public servants do so in order to serve us and their country; truth be told, they enter public service to serve themselves. Influence, power, and wealth are commonly the motive, but we cannot rule out as well the fact that an opportunity to live comfortably and be rewarded for idleness is as much a great inducement. To plead that one is in public service because of his love of fellow man is mere sick hypocrisy and naive cleverness.

By depending upon public service for a subsistence, a powerful inducement is given to pursue it at whatever means, and it would be no misrepresentation to add that whoever pursues public service for the sake of its profits and the prospect of personal gratification, which is nearly everybody, that someone will sacrifice his virtuous propensities to the promotion of his own selfish ends. It is frequently in the power of a public servant to involve other people in public interests against their own private interests.

These public interests, whatever they may be, are not pursued on moral or rational grounds, but solely on the grounds of secret and hypocritical interests. Noble and heart-tugging words are enlisted to hide the deformity of their real principles. Public servants, it must be remembered, have a standard of morality that is antisocial. By this standard, that which is frowned upon in private life is permissible in public life.

From this distorted system of morals, we find that a public servant who may not pick our pockets in his private life, and is sufficiently amiable under those circumstances, is, on the other hand, quite at home to pick those same pockets in his public life as he enlists the force of the public service machinery.

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Whatever may be the views of public servants on morality, wearing one standard in their private life, and another in their public chambers, it cannot be denied by all people who are faithful to their consciences and have a genuine interest in the good of others, that only one standard of morality exists, deducible from the nature of man himself; and that to that standard is required the universal conformity of all the people.

I believe that the greatest cause of the popularity of public service and its general acceptance everywhere consists in the rather false belief that to disown oneself and sacrifice one's skills and talents for others, even fallaciously, is a higher good to which glory and honor is attached.

This false belief, taken to be true, something of purity or dignity is supposed to be associated with the character of a public servant, having its sanction in the mysterious notion that he, who makes it his business to serve the rest of the public, is superior in virtue. While we rarely find no virtuous men in public service institutions, yet there is something about public service, real or imagined, which is so powerful that it allures men of all classes, and blinds almost everybody else since we see that it induces us all to endure its waste, lies, destructive decisions, injuries, and other preventable hardships.

But there, of course, is no grain of truth in this much-loved fabulous declamation that public service is the crown of virtue though the common mind has not awakened to diligently investigate into the motives of why a man would want to engage in the service of others even against their wishes; or even that those who he wishes to serve have proven themselves to be quite competent in the service of their own interests without the aid of a public servant. It is obvious that public service cannot be carried on and tolerated without the co-operation of those who it is said it is in their interest to bide by it.

Notwithstanding the absence of virtue in public service, it is still urged we ought to speak of public servants in distinguished terms: His Exellency! The Honorable Comrade! The Commander-in-Chief!

What could be more vain than this?

But if we attempt to ask why that distinction is allotted to the public servant, we are quickly pointed to their selflessness in serving others or their patriotism. I think it absurd to regard anybody as selfless who enters into an occupation, if occupation is the right word, under the pretext of making other people's lives better when the true motive is control, influence, and profit.

I trust that the reader will agree with me when I observe that our lives are made better by persons engaged in the pursuit of their own private ends. The business of public service, a business of coercion, is attractive mostly to those of mediocre or no talent at all.

What of patriotism? I could do no better than Stephen Decatur in asserting that "Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!"

Patriotism, to be frank, may induce a person to sacrifice his life for the laws and liberties of his country, furnish for him a foundation for his public service; but what really is meant by this? To contend that public service is a patriotic duty is simply disingenuous and untrue for no man could have such purity of motive.

But certainly there is a powerful motive, I contend, that in many a person who enters public service must prefer a life of idleness to industry. I hold it to be true that people are raised above the state of brutes by the diffusion of ideas that have been found to be useful and life-affirming, however offensive others, like public servants, may find them.

What, then, is the foundation of public service? Is it selflessness? Experience denies this to be the foundation, and serious intellectual examination despises it. A search for the source of this institution will yield nothing but a sandy foundation in spite of its pomp, its rigid rituals, its inflexible procedures, its incongruous rules, and its wasteful ceremonies. This vast, brilliant, and admirable immense structure is, however, a temple of doom raised to multiply poverty and retard progress. And as such we may rightly proclaim it to be a systematized crime.

A high crime!

But it is perhaps instructive to admit that the most operative encouragement that the public servant secretly cherishes is contained in the circumstance that public opinion does not hold him in contempt. On the contrary, his profession and public conduct derive almost all their reputation from public opinion.

If, therefore, public opinion is silent on criminal acts of public service, venturing no censure at all; if, in spite of his vices and crimes, public opinion rewards him, what restraint remains upon the passions of a public servant? The public service life is made a privileged profession in which a man may indulge vices and crimes with impunity. His occupation shields him from punishment.

Such, then, are amongst the principal points in support of public service institutions. Some consist in want of thought, and some in delusion, while all are simply criminal. Whether any or all of them form a motive to the unwitting impoverishment of human beings, such as a reasoning man, who abstracts himself from habitual feelings, can contemplate with approbation, is a question which every one should ask and determine for himself. After that determination, we may, with good reason, question the defensibility and maintenance of the custom of public service institutions. If the motives to public service are impure, public service itself cannot be virtuous.

In brief, the beautiful rhetoric of the Obamas and the McCains, and all those vague and meaningless expressions political scientists have invented (representative government, public service, public good, minister of finance, etc.), in order to render subtle that which they believe to be the concealed principle of our salvation and progress are in fact tools by which one class of people brutalizes another.

It is a rather strange doctrine that the people's ignorance could be remedied by the invention of words to which they could never attach any true sense or meaning. Let us then be frank with ourselves and conclude rightly that the people's pretentious institutions of public service have their foundation in error, arising from mistaken opinions concerning our existence; that their doctrines on public things, broached with such seeming confidence, are the offspring of their own ignorance and superstitions, making mass death at our own hands a commonplace.