The consequences of our lack of moral compass
The most direct consequence of our nation's failure to ever question its motives or its morality is that we develop a view of our motives and actions that is greatly at odds with reality. Chomsky explains:
When you conquer somebody and suppress them, you have to have a reason. You can't just say, "I'm a son of a b*tch and I want to rob them." You have to say it's for their good, they deserve it, or they actually benefit from it. We're helping them. That was the attitude of slave owners. Most of them didn't say, "Look, I'm enslaving these people because I want easily exploitable, cheap labor for my own benefit." They said, "We're doing them a favor. They need it."
Thus, the failure to question ourselves means that we have an extremely distorted view of ourselves. Arrogance breeds arrogance, which is accompanied by blindness.
It entrenches the fundamental principle that we have a right to use violence anywhere we like and nobody has a right to deter it...The presupposition is that the United States owns the world. If that's not the case, if you reject that, then you can't debate whether Iran is interfering in Iraq... Only if you accept the assumption that the United States rules the world by right can you then ask whether someone else is interfering in a country that we invaded and occupied... One corollary is that the only thing that matters is the costs to us.
Conclusion
Only the morally blind could believe that our invasion and occupation of Iraq is morally justified. George Bush and Dick Cheney claim that we are doing it for the benefit of the Iraqi people. Any idiot could tell you that if we did it for their benefit we wouldn't have killed 4% of their civilian population, made refugees out of 20%, left 90% of the remainder with a desire to see us leave, and devastated their infrastructure. And then our leaders act outraged over the fact that the Iraqis won't cooperate with us "after all we've done for them".
Therefore, it is evident that as a nation we have become morally blind. Our nation was founded upon the idea that all men are created equal and have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Most of our citizens claim to adhere to a religion that tells us to treat others as we would like to be treated and to love our neighbors. Yet, we behave as if we own the world, and that we have the right to do whatever we want to any of the world's inhabitants in order to attain the mysterious purposes that our leaders say we need to attain – for whatever excuse they think they can get away with.
That is not to say that all, or even necessarily most Americans feel this way. Many are simply blissfully ignorant. Many others simply don't have the capability for independent thought necessary to resist the barrage of thought manipulation that we're subjected to. Still others use psychological denial to avoid facing truths that they can't emotionally handle. And many others do in fact recognize the immorality of our nation's imperial activities, but they feel powerless to do anything about it. How many fall into each of these categories? How would we know? Pollsters never ask questions that address these issues. They simply ask whether we are for against the war, without daring to address the reasons for being against it. These issues are never discussed by our national corporate news media. David Edwards sums up this mystery in the last paragraph of his article:
In short, we can be manipulated in any number of subtle ways... The consequence of this is that it is not enough simply to succeed in unearthing the facts about, say, our government's complicity in human rights atrocities abroad, because fundamental areas of our belief system may have been subject to the same influences which made the recovery of those facts so difficult. We may have gained the facts, but not the belief that is up to us to do anything about them; either because we are not "experts', or because truth, compassion and understanding seem a side issue and even a hindrance in our lives... The world is full of examples of individuals who have glimpsed the horror of what is being done in their name in the Third World, or who have collided with the limits of justice and freedom in their own lives, but have turned away for exactly this reason.
What is the answer to our way out of this situation – which will destroy the world if not reversed? I can't answer that. But I do like what Chomsky had to say about this on the last page of his book, as at least a partial answer:
I don't think it's even a question of taking risks. It's a matter of being decent. Love of people? Yes, of course, or at least commitment to them and their needs.
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