To my left-liberal friends

Having lived in the US since the time of Reagan I feel nowadays - in the end of 2013 - an eery sense of foreboding. Something will happen, something on a scale not seen since the wars of the 20th century. Not a "consciousness shift" that would guarantee peace and prosperity and life everafter in the harmony with nature which will gently bestow upon us her splendid gifts. Not material violence and destruction. I feel something else that is invisibly hollowing out the soul of Americans. That void is increasing and a point is approaching when a great cry will be uttered: "Oh my god, we have lost our soul." While we enjoy our amusements, our soul is being destroyed by the monster of the "lesser evil." We are supporting the lesser evil as it were not evil and as if we were not responsible for its actions.

Why is it a "lesser evil" - if it kills every day scores of innocents abroad under the guise of the war on terror? Was Reagan's expansion of the US nuclear weapons program a "greater" evil - even when those weapons did not kill a single person? The "lesser" weapons of Obama kill many more.

And if you think that this is a "lesser" evil - is not opposing it the right thing to do? Or at least exerting political pressure and a pressure of public opinion so that this evil we elected to live with is diminished every day?

I think we all know that the fight to reduce even the "lesser" of evils is the right thing to do but yet we do not do it. Why? Oh why!!!

Because we have bought into the party of evil - the lesser one that it may be. We have something to gain by cooperating and by not obstructing the path of power. We want to hold on to power ourselves, to the portion of power that we released into the hands of our government. We want minor aspects of power, aspects of it that we could have held ourselves by our industrious efforts, but we preferred to become subsidiaries of a greater power, a power luckily deemed to still be a lesser evil.

We wanted to be safe: from the risk of illness, from an occasional wacko with a gun, extremely safe on an airplane trip, safe in a steady job and prosperous retirement, be assured that our food and drugs are superbly safe too. To arrive at these ends we call on the coercive hand of the government to weigh in. As if we could not achieve most of those safeties and comforts through our own free and peaceful arrangements - or our own sovereign powers if need be. We want to be nannied and coddled - preferably by a "lesser evil" power.

The dissonance between allowing ourselves to be cared for by a ruthless power of the state and our own aspirations of creating our own life in honesty and peace will be soon felt. This hollowing of our soul will be felt mostly when we lose the sovereignty of our own power and will only ask for the subsidiary powers as servile subjects of the state. When we try to shake off the servility we will be punished. That is the nature of the "lesser evil". Do you want that?

Do you want to condone any sort of policy - violent, militaristic, criminal - to protect the government because you already bought goods and services from it? Did this man sell you stuff and now you are protecting him to ensure the delivery?

Obama giving State of the Union address in January 2014

If we settle for the "lesser evil" do we want to do something to make it even less evil? How do we do that? And if we don't then aren't we assuring that the evil we settled for will grow to become greater. Maybe in a short time it will get worse than the one we initially had rejected. Or maybe while settled and coddled by the lesser evil the vexation will lead us, irrationally perhaps, to lurch to electing the "greater evil" that will step in inheriting all the powers of the former.

The impending moment for America is a moment of revolting shame, disgust with oneself and self-hatred. Comfortable, self-satisfied we will suddenly realize what price we have paid. Not unlike in Nazi Germany where atrocities and even genocide were justified by the need of the people for safety and comfort - for the "Lebensraum". Here in America we call it American interests abroad, which we are free to defend with lethal force. So said our president to the United Nations last fall. And here we do not prosecute the Jews, but revile corporations that operate for the abominable profit, forgetting conveniently that we ask the government to collude with the largest of them in service of some public interest, and in service of benefits that we have commissioned.

My liberal friends! Please understand that you are asking for your own disempowering. You want the individual to give up some of their power, that is liberty and material means, in favour of the state (typically the US federal government) and then ask the government to return to you benefits obtained in transferring the power into the hands of large corporations. That is how you become serfs and vassals of the state and of the corporation.