Marianne Williamson: Getting Only Half the Point

At American Greatness Matthew Boose takes a look at the unexpectedly popular Marianne Williamson who, he proposes is bringing something to politics other than mere wonkery.

Like Trump, Williamson is an outsider who understands that politics is about bigger things than what can be reduced to policy bromides. 

Well yes. But Mariane Williamson is a preacher -- if a new-age preacher -- and I thought that we were supposed to have a separation between church and state.

Williamson is outraging the liberals, apparently, because she is saying that you can't cure depression with drugs, and that is "anti-science." Well maybe she has a point. Maybe we have a problem, Houston.

To admit that America is broken spiritually invites reflection on the cultural revolution of the past half-century. Has America really progressed, or have things gotten worse?

Why are there so many mass shootings these days? Why are young Americans killing themselves at record high rates? Why are they having children at record low rates? Why are diagnoses of depression and anxiety so high, despite a marked jump in antidepressant use? Why is life expectancy in the wealthiest nation on earth going down, rather than up? 

Yes but. Politics is downstream of culture is downstream of religion. The job of politicians is to divide the voters at election time -- on my maxim that politics is division -- and the job of policy wonks is to figure out how to divvy up the loot one more time -- on my maxim that government is an armed minority that taxes the people to reward its supporters.

The whole question of what is the good life, what is the right way of life, what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything comes upstream of politics. It is the subject matter of religion.

And, according to the Bill of Rights, the United States shall have no establishment of religion.

However, even a semi-moron can see that religion is always bumping into politics and politics is always bumping into religion. That is because when the nation's legislators make laws they are necessarily informed by their various religions. They have a vision of the Good Life and Justice and they are bound and determined to get there.

In our age, with the decline in authority of Axial Age religions, new religions are popping up all over. They may be Socialism, the idea of building a Heaven on Earth with government power. They may be Nietzsche's Übermensch off in the mountains doing his Zarathustra thing. They may be Jungians getting in touch with their personal or collective unconscious. Or they may be new-age gurus like Marianne Williamson.

And wouldn't you know. All these religions seem to take a remarkable interest in politics.

But our Founding Fathers knew that this was a problem. The problem was identified for our age by our liberal friends who found it intolerable when fundamentalist Christians were "legislating morality." Or when McCarthyites were flushing Communists out of the State Department and the public schools.

But now the shoe is on the other foot and liberals and lefties all over are legislating their morality and getting conservatives bounced from their jobs at Google and Mozilla. Notice that the liberals that are beside themselves with McCarthyism have no problem with the defenestration of folks that don't worship in their church.

To talk about our political problem in terms of Trump and Williamson going a bit deeper than the usual idiot wonks is to miss the problem.

The problem is that, with government so busy with 1,001 programs -- all of which come down to some sort of idea of Good and Evil which all originate in some sort of religion or quasi-religion -- there will inevitably be a lot of religious conflict arising out of some peoples' religion getting to set the government agenda and other peoples' religion getting marginalized as "bigoted" or "superstitious".

If government were smaller then people could exercise their religions and project their values in the public square without having to fight to get government on their side.

For in the real world people only "get" the notions that are taken for granted in their cultural bubble. Their beliefs and their understanding of the meaning of life, the universe and everything go without saying. But other peoples' faith and beliefs are experienced as a threat.

You can see the problem. If people get the power of government on their side then they will use it to neutralize the "threat" from other peoples' beliefs.

And since, on my reductive Three Peoples theory, there are at least three kinds of people on this Earth that means that there are three world views competing for that government dollar and the opportunity to legislate their morality.

The less government there is the more that each of the Three Peoples can live according to their values and not keep bumping into people that think they are a threat.