The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in America

Everyone likes that movie - or at least almost everyone. Many have tried to diagnose societal ills and use that movie's title as a framework for doing so. I'm no exception.

I can think of three types of people in America: normal/well-intentioned folks, authority sluts, and entitlement sluts. They comprise the good, bad, and ugly respectively. Fortunately, the "good" is the largest category demographically, even during the evil mood of times likes these. They definitely do not have power though. You could think of them as a very silent majority. Most normal people may not have the most sophisticated understanding of our world's problems and may be prone to falling for the traps set by the other types of folk (sub-prime mortgages, credit cards like crazy, global warming), but they are good at heart. Deep down, most have a respect for private property and believe that everyone should work for what they get.

Then there are the authority sluts, the ones who either think they have a divine right to boss people around or are just sociopaths. This refers to lots of people in power and particularly police officers. Granted, not all people in power are authority sluts (some are just opportunists). You can tell the individual who has an authority trip by the way they treat others. They operate in accordance to very loose rules and quite often don't bother to find any justification for their ruthlessness at all. A great example of this is the officer who takes you down to the station for "insulting an officer" or "disturbing the peace." It seems like hardly anyone gets in trouble for real crimes these days. One's only hope is that these types encounter someone who is more powerful than they are and busts them down a notch.

The entitlement sluts are irritating in many obvious ways. It's one thing to prefer making an honest living by oneself, self-employed. It's quite another to think that everyone else owes you this regardless of how well your business does. I always think of the farmers who whine for subsidies (although most subsidies go to bigger companies) because they feel entitled to be farmers just like their fathers and grandfathers. It matters not whether anyone wants to buy their crops. Then, of course, there are the Americans who are part of an entire class of entitlement insanity, the Americans who draw from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I don't refer to those who receive these "services" reluctantly yet disagree with them. Here I criticize those who think it's a god-right even though it's predicated on stolen wealth. This is the second-largest category. Entitlement sluts think that their standards of living cannot slip any lower than their recent plights, and, if it so much as appears to do so, then the rest of the world has hell to pay. If there's not hell to pay, they'll at least cry about it for a while.

These are in a way ideal types. It is easy to think of examples of overlap between authority and entitlement sluts. Nevertheless, as a psychological framework, I think this breaks people down into neat categories as well as anything else. It would be nice to think of everyone as INDIVIDUALS. Regrettably, this current social order has been thrust onto us by the way society has been shaped through years of American fascism. In a free market society, people would be more identified by what they do to contribute (baker, shoemaker, car salesman, dentist). The status quo is not the way I want it. It is just how I'm calling it based on what I've seen. The American population is fairly neatly situated into three categories: the good, the bad, and the ugly.