The following response by Benjamin Creme offers a clearer understanding of affairs in the US and a possibile workable solution for improved human relations. (NB: This was written a few decades ago).
“The US is a strange country. Because of the extraordinary power of the 6th-ray idealism of the US, there are communal experiments going on throughout the nation that foster co-operation and goodwill. Comparing the US to any of the European countries, including Britain, there is more community sense, more real desire for co-operation and the expression of goodwill, more manifested love at the goodwill level, in communities in the US.
There is, probably, better literature written in the US about creating co-operative communities than anywhere else. But you have to export it. Instead of exporting the concept of competition, you have to export the concept of co-operation. That idealism is the strength of the US. At the same time you have a terribly competitive spirit, the demonstration of competition as nowhere on earth. Competition is the very nature of political and economic life in the US, and, of course, for that reason is extremely powerful and infectious. So, too, could be the co-operative spirit, which is being exercised in communities throughout the nation. Co-operative communities are always the result of experiment. They are idealistic, but also pragmatic. People have found that by co-operating they get better communities; they get the facilities denied by your Government.
In the US you have one of those ‘hands-off’ governments which believes that the government should not intervene — which means pay for the services of civic life. I believe that the government should be responsible for the services of the community. In the US you have ‘right-wing’ governments, even if Democrats are in office. By comparison with a European state they are extremely ‘right-wing’. We have the same kind of governments in Europe and elsewhere, but the US ‘right-wing’ is against spending money on services: it believes all of that should be in private hands, a private industry. It is only a theory and either you believe in the theory or you do not.
We can go on ‘till kingdom come’ discussing the benefits or otherwise of these different theories. I personally think that the people of any country, by participatory activity, should provide for their needs. “We the State” — that is us, not the State ‘up there’, the government, the Prime Minister or the President and his entourage — should provide for the people’s needs. I do not separate the state from the people who make it up, provided they have a real degree of participation in the government, in the say-so of how the money is spent.
The entrepreneurial spirit which especially ‘right-wing’ and which Republican politicians support should be limited, I believe, to more or less the luxury aspects of society. I think that education, healthcare, transport, coal, gas, water, and electrical power (or whatever power we use in the future) should be state-run. They should be national enterprises, run for the benefit of all, and one day, I believe, that is how it will be. The ‘embroideries’ on that, the cultural and service industries, should be in the hands of entrepreneurial activity. It is the creative action of individuals that can best cater to the refinement of such needs.”
REFLECTIONS 