Bill Moyer’s Comment about Thomas Jefferson’s Failure to Live His Equality Writings Reminds Us of Our Parallel Love Affair with Similarly Deep Hypocrisy — Greed Is the Common Theme
© 2012 Peter Free
02 July 2012
Citation
Bill Moyers, On Independence Day, Also Remember Thomas Jefferson's Betrayal, Huffington Post (02 July 2012)
Regarding Thomas Jefferson
Bill Moyers wrote:
Jefferson himself was an aristocrat whose inheritance of 5,000 acres, and the slaves to work it, mocked his eloquent notion of equality.
He acknowledged that slavery degraded master and slave alike, but would not give his own slaves their freedom. Their labor kept him financially afloat.
Hundreds of slaves, forced like beasts of burden to toil from sunrise to sunset under threat of the lash, enabled him to thrive as a privileged gentleman, to pursue his intellectual interests, and to rise in politics.
Even the children born to him by the slave Sally Hemings remained slaves, as did their mother. Only an obscure provision in his will released his children after his death. All the others -- scores of slaves -- were sold to pay off his debts.
Whatever he was thinking when he wrote "all men are created equal," he also believed black people were inferior to white people. . . . To read his argument today is to enter the pathology of white superiority that attended the birth of our nation.
© 2012 Bill Moyers, On Independence Day, Also Remember Thomas Jefferson's Betrayal, Huffington Post (02 July 2012) (paragraphs split)
Our similar conflict
As I have mentioned before — here and here, for example — most of the rhetorical spoutings we hear about American freedom and democracy are intended to camouflage the selfish interests of the people doing the talking.
The irritating part is how many people believe the nonsense and vote for the people who exploit them.
“So, who cares, Pete?”
I mention this in the Jefferson context because the gap between what he said and what he did is equally extreme.
So, one has to ask, “How can supposedly reasonably intelligent people say things that are so far apart from what they actually do?”
There was certainly no way that Jefferson could not have been aware that what he said was not how he acted every day — at least not without inventing all sorts of invidious definitions of the words that he was using.
Rather than come up with psycho-babble about the reasons for these people’s lack of semantic and intellectual integrity, I more simply credit this disingenuousness to the concealing power of self-interest. Talking a good line seems to outweigh living a good line for most people, most of the time. Consequently, it is easy to lure voters to support one’s political ambitions by speaking about democratic freedom and simultaneously doing whatever one can under the table to pick their pockets.
I mention this Jeffersonian example to show how deeply selfishness affects our perspectives in a hypocrisy-attracting way.
The moral? — Evaluate where the self-interest lies, and you will have a grasp on the real direction of most folks’ allegedly disinterested blather
Both American political parties are guilty of manipulative hypocrisy in virtually everything they say.
On the Fourth of July, it might be wise to reflect on what the words of the Declaration of Independence actually mean. And contrast their meaning with the actuality on the ground.