All That Glisters Is Not Gold

Recently a friend of mine who was raised in England denounced the prime ministerial reign of Margaret Thatcher, describing from his own experience how the newly privatized telephone company saw to it that the telephone service was immediately available to the businesses of the financial center of London, the so called City, whereas others, including my friend, suffered a series of delinquencies.  He ascribed a kind of conspiracy in which Mrs. Thatcher was determined to reward only her friends and cronies who were the larger corporations and businessmen.  But, I countered, couldn't we argue that her philosophy of humankind was based on the profit motive?  That all human activity that counts, would be for her, something that led to a profit.  I tried to put her into a bigger perspective.  Ancient heroic epic, for instance, isn't it about powerful people who plunder, who conquer and exploit?  Don't we have Odysseus in the second book of the Iliad striking Thersites with his staff for speaking out against Agamemnon and his shameless exploitation of the army and his greedy profit taking?  Doesn't the poet and by extension the poet's audience believe that the mighty are the glorious?  I once read an interesting anthropological account of the Aztec period in Mexico in which the authors pointed out that a priestly caste came about when men of power, strength, and imagination realized that this was a way to dominate the masses and exploit them for their own gain.  Can we not see the same thing in the workings of the Roman Catholic Church where an elite clergy has made a handsome living for themselves from the offerings of the many who have been led to believe that their salvation is determined by the priestly caste?  We live in a time when the newspapers are filled with the outrageous profit taking by banks and the directors and senior officers of corporations against whose sometime illegalities the government does not seem to make a move.  It seems that this is because in our time no one seems to argue against the notion that profit, gain, and wealth are absolute goods.  Isn't "Downton Abby" a kind of elegant statement of the virtue of exploitation?  So Mrs. Thatcher was not evil, she was true to a conviction firmly held, learned in the home of her childhood, that the individual's first obligation is to make a profit.   My husband, on whom I tried out these ideas at lunch, countered with the idea that humanity must base its raison d'etre on improving the condition of society as a whole.  Of course, Mrs. Thatcher would have immediately come back at him with her famous "There is no such thing as society, only people."  I think back to the Christian teachings of my youth where, yes, the well being of the whole of mankind was always in the thoughts and prayers we heard or internalized.  I was raised to believe that those who sought after wealth and power were likely to lose their souls, and while one could not stop them in their perverse and ugly desire for profit and gain, one knew that they were corrupt in heart and soul.  I guess I really do believe that, it's why I am thankful that I had the chance to make my life's work as something that was a service to others, glad that I have never had to measure it all out in dollars and cents, why it is, I suppose, that my instinct is always to shun people who labor for gain, rather than for service.  I imagine that Mrs. Thatcher could look back on her role in making the City of London the financial center of the world and take pride, and not look to the misery she helped to create elsewhere in England.  Many are called, few are chosen.  It's an ugly truth she was enunciating, one that is very much the mantra of the rich and powerful today.  But I am not sure that they are to be damned for thinking only of their profits, since I am not sure that there is any other philosophical or moral position out there to subscribe to in this day and age.  Certainly there seems little impetus in the belief that since the many cannot function an adversary or entrepreneur manner like the few they must support wholeheartedly an instrument of government that protects and promotes their interests against the rapacious few.  That is not vicious class war, as so many decry; it is a common sense procedure to maintain some check and balance in the flow of wealth as it circulates through the population of the nation.