Zero Effort

This Bloom County strip tickled me when I first saw it, decades ago, not only for its overt humor, but for its spot-on awareness of human nature. It is no coincidence that both the obesity “epidemic” and the body-positivity movement fizzled out with remarkable speed the moment tirzepatide, semaglutide, and other effective weight loss drugs hit the market. Losing weight the natural way requires fundamental behavioral changes and persistent diligence. While you don’t have to live like an ascetic, you do have to be “good” 80-90% of the time. And then, once you’ve hit your goals, you still have to embrace a real change from the way you used to live and eat.

With the new drugs, your need for willpower is handled chemically. In other words, by an external force. You don’t have to try to change your ways, you don’t have to exert strength of will over your predilections. Those predilections are managed from without.

The parallel struck me as I discussed our massive spending and debt problem in the wake of a recent post. Those of us who know the problem needs to be addressed, vigorously, are few and drowned out by the people who are casually convinced that it can all be remedied by taxing someone else.

In other words, without them having to change their ways or suffer any privation. Even ardent conservatives, when presented with the irrefutable problems with Social Security, go into full denial mode and insist against all evidence that “their money” not be touched.

This is, I’ve concluded, a natural consequence of our society’s affluence. We’ve grown so accustomed to the enormous... nay, unprecedented wealth of our society that we’ve forgotten that poverty is the natural and default state, and that maintaining and growing wealth requires effort.

The people who haven’t forgotten include those who lived under socialist oppression. Eastern Europeans, Cubans, and others are among the most fervent critics of the modern Left’s socialistic desires. The people who talk up socialism and think the new “democratic socialism” is the cat’s pajamas are typically young native-born people who grew up, if not outright affluently, well-to-do and got themselves (often useless) college degrees. These socialist wannabes want a zero-effort life, paid for by earners and producers, and made so by the threat of government violence.

When was the last time you heard one of these self-absorbed brats declare they want to contribute to society? They always figure to be on the receiving end of the government’s redistributions. They want a society that will provide more benefit them without changing any of their own behaviors.

Magical thinking at its finest.