Anti-intellectualism AND self-centeredness ... or, the thoroughly depressing week that was, Part 3.

Is there any compelling reason why they both can't be killing America, simultaneously?

Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America: Social dysfunction can be traced to the abandonment of reason, by David Niose

... In considering the senseless loss of nine lives in Charleston, of course racism jumps out as the main issue. But isn’t ignorance at the root of racism? And it’s true that the bloodshed is a reflection of America's violent, gun-crazed culture, but it is only our aversion to reason as a society that has allowed violence to define the culture. Rational public policy, including policies that allow reasonable restraints on gun access, simply isn't possible without an informed, engaged, and rationally thinking public.

The bookend essay at Psychology Today isn't so much counterpoint as piling on.

No, Self-centeredness is Killing America: A lack of empathy is at the root of our ills, by Ravi Chandra M.D.

David Niose rightly points out one problem in America: anti-intellectualism and the abandonment of critical thinking in certain sectors of society. However, I think this is simply a spoke on the deeper, more central issue that is at the hub of why we hate, are polarized and sometimes kill in the name of our beliefs. We are very, very self-centered and therefore we believe our own snuff.

Poverty, empathy, jobs and harmful things.

This fellow named Jefferson once wrote: "Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

If you don’t understand how people fall into poverty, you’re probably a sociopath, by Lucy Mangan (Guardian)

... Politicians, for example, are apparently completely baffled by Poor People’s propensity to do harmful things, often expensively, to themselves. (That’s politicians of all stripes – it’s just that the left wing wrings its hands and feels helplessly sorry for Them, while Tories are pretty sure They are just animals in need of better training.) The underclass eats fast food, drinks and smokes, and some of its more unruly members even take drugs. Why? Why?

The Koch brothers plan to spend $889 million to preserve this status quo. Small wonder the Pillsbury workers organized prayer vigils.

Where’s the Empathy?, by Nicholas Kristof (New York Times)

The funeral for my high school buddy Kevin Green is Saturday, near this town where we both grew up.

The doctors say he died at age 54 of multiple organ failure, but in a deeper sense he died of inequality and a lack of good jobs.

Lots of Americans would have seen Kevin — obese with a huge gray beard, surviving on disability and food stamps — as a moocher. They would have been harshly judgmental: Why don’t you look after your health? Why did you father two kids outside of marriage?

That acerbic condescension reflects one of this country’s fundamental problems: an empathy gap. It reflects the delusion on the part of many affluent Americans that those like Kevin are lazy or living cushy lives. A poll released this month by the Pew Research Center found that wealthy Americans mostly agree that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”