Today I want to talk about a perverse incentive that some Americans may have for preferring a more authoritarian government – it can give them a certain type of freedom that we don’t have in a democracy, the freedom to ignore collective responsibilities.
As we all know, there’s been considerable discussion lately about how much white America, and many white Americans, have profited from the labors of Black people. This Brookings Institute paper sums it up – when you compare the average “wealth” or “net worth” of white and Black Americans, the difference is shocking. If you add up the value of your house (if you own it), your car, your retirement fund, whatever’s in your bank accounts, and whatever other “stuff” you have, and subtract the balances left on your mortgage, your car loan, your student loans, and whatever else you owe like credit card debt, that’s your net worth. For white families, the average net worth is $171,000. For Black families, it’s only $17,600. The average white high school drop-out has a higher net worth than the average Black college graduate! Hard work and personal initiative cannot reliably make up the difference – there’s a huge gap. And that’s behind the reparations movement, the idea that we should collectively do something to make things more fair.
The paper notes that reparations are not unprecedented – we’ve supported compensation for Native Americans and Japanese-Americans, and we required Germany to compensate Holocaust victims after World War II. But although some slave owners received their own reparations to compensate them for the loss of their human “property,” the Emancipation promise of “40 acres and a mule” for African Americans was quickly rescinded. The paper also describes how Black Americans were largely excluded from the New Deal and the G.I. Bill – and we all know the attitude many Americans have toward Affirmative Action programs.
And then consider all the broken promises the U.S. government made to the hundreds of thousands of Native people deprived of their ancestral lands and livelihoods. Today’s Native people have the highest poverty rates and lowest education levels of any major population group in America, problems that have been compounded by Covid-19.
A great many of us would conclude that we as a nation are collectively indebted to the descendants of these people who were wronged by our government and our ancestors.
One thing that isn’t a story is a description of sensations and impressions. It could be the wildflowers you saw on your walk through the woods, a strange cloud in the sky, the interesting melody that’s stuck in your head, the happiness you felt when your extra-shy kitten reached with his extra-big paws to grab at your hand. None of those are stories. This distinction points out a key difference between people with moderately advanced dementia and people with healthier brains, by the way: Once you’ve got dementia, your brain still has plenty of input of what’s going on around you – you still see and hear things – but you tend to lose your ability to connect your impressions coherently, which includes being able to tell a full-scale story about them.
Personally, I stopped reading after the third book, although I’d probably return to the series if the rest are ever published. Other fans are more emotionally invested and have had stronger feelings on the topic than myself. 
The Meta-Narrator 