Personality Tests

On morning walks, my husband and I spend a lot of time talking about the differences between Democrats and Republicans. This morning's conversation, spurred initially by a flat tire produced by my son's fledgling parking skills (or lack thereof) and the additional lack of a full size spare looked at the erosion of society starting with something as trivial as a tire. All cars used to have full-sized spare tires. Somewhere along the way, car manufacturers figured out that they could substitute a cheap tire for temporary use that would save them a bundle of money over time, because people would still buy the car. And how often do you really get flat tires anyway (about once every four months in our family, as it turns out). So the customer gets a worse product, and the car maker gets more money. On the surface, this one example is not the cause of the demise of Western civilization as we've come to know it and have mixed feelings about it. However, it does serve as an emblem of greed vs. altruism. So when the person who came up with the idea of a "donut" was congratulating himself (and Firestone takes credit for pioneering this idea in 1979 -- the same Firestone that helped to do away with mass transit on the west coast in the late 1930s) on helping car manufacturers make more money, he wasn't congratulating himeself for making a high quality item that would serve customers well. Firestone wins out twice. The car manufacterers love the cheaper tire, so they buy them and then the customer has to buy another tire after their son drives it into a tall curb at high speed.

So there are people who derive satisfaction from doing a good job -- from making something of high quality or helping people (think Jonas Salk and free vaccines for everyone) and society benefits by having quality goods or better health care or safer food or . . . The converse are the people like Mr. Firestone and his ilk who derive satisfaction from their stockholders response to the bottom line. Assuming (and this is not an all-encompassing rule, because there are exceptions on both sides) that Dr. Salk represents a Democrat's mind set, and the unnamed Mr. Firestone represents a Republican, the differences between the two are very clear cut, as are their overall impacts on society. There is some evidence that the root of these differences may be genetic.

And here's why that makes sense: all organisms are driven by the force to survive and reproduce. At our most base level, that's what humans do. And the Republican strategy -- to "win" at any cost, whether it be to simply make things up, or to refuse to do something for the greater good, is the perfect strategy for the individual looking for biological success.

But here's what doesn't make sense: we are humans, not bacteria, mushrooms, algae, roses, or ferrets. We are capable of reasoning. And it is reasonable to think that helping people is good for human society as a whole and good for the individual. We have managed to come up with invention after invention. In America, we turn on the tap and have clean water. People rarely die from sepsis occuring due to unsterile conditions in surgery. More people than not do not go hungry because food is cheap here. The list goes on and on. And these all stem from things that Republicans call "socialist" and try to do away with. Even though they benefit from these very same things, and we are, in fact, social creatures . So why can't we breed the Republican gene out of our society? Well, the same traits that make Republicans detract from society in other areas, make them reproduce more than Democrats. Being more altruistic leads to having fewer children because of the awareness of the impact on the environment and world population.

At the end of the day, what this means is that humans design flaw is our ability to reason and create. If we could just be more like other animals, we would not be able to produce artifacts of our humanity that can destroy the planet or wipe out most of the members of our species and others. We could follow the Republican strategy with no awareness of ill effects, and, in fact, fewer of them. Unfortunately, for those of us who do reason, the slow spiral around the drain is hard to watch.