Bill Moyers - The great divide today is a radical lack of empathy

[housewolf]

Watching on CSpan2 BookTv now, Bill Moyers interviewed by Garrison Kellor on 6/13/2011, it's fulfilling nourishment for a Sunday morning

"The rich and the very powerful suffer today from the characteristics of being sociopaths, that is a radical deprived of empathy" ... "When you are radically deprived of empathy and you want to pay the least amount of taxes instead of supporting the great consortium that is embodied in the preamble to the Constitution - "We the people in order to" - when you want to not carry your fair share, you begin to deprive everybody else of the things that made my life.

I grew up poor. My father had a 4th grade education. He never made over 100 a month up until his last few years when he joined a union, and I have his last pay stub - $96 and some odd cents after taxes. But I went to good public schools in Marshall, Texas - by the way, they were an antidote to any fundamentalist preaching we were getting in town. I drove on a public highway to a public university, the University of Texas. I stopped in public parks. I used public facilities. And most important of all, I had access to public libraries. I never walked through that library at the University of Texas without thinking "All of these were written for me by people who didn't know me.
This whole university was built by people who didn't know me and whom I will never know, because they believed in us. Us. The preamble to the Constitution.

And they invested their money in public institutions. And this gap between the rich and poor today is starving the public sector despite our enormous debts. It's retreating from the public life of the nation. So that the rich will be behind their gated communities and the rest of America in the next 20 or 30 years, if we don't reverse this trend, will be like areas of India, where they're just left... you know, the doctrine of the right is the survival of the fittest. Every man for himself. And if that happens, that means that society becomes a jungle.

Civilization is but a thin veneer of civility stretched across the passions of the human heart. And we have to work to keep that civilization. When people withdraw their consent and withdraw their support from it, then you're right close to a reversion to a pre-civilization society. And that's what troubles me about the elites today who suffer from, I think, the worst of all religious sins, which is malignant narcissism."


You can watch the entire interview here, it's about 1.5 hr:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Moyer