Understanding the President

Everyone is trying to figure out what motivates President Obama; what makes him tick?

Some people point to his community organizing days when he learned to shakedown businesses through a “protester for hire” scheme that benefited paying customers. Others point to the sundry socialists and communists that populated his childhood and college years. Others point to his large ego or his “thin skin”. Others point to his tendency to govern through Executive Orders or Presidential decrees. Others think he was abused as a child or that he is a closet communist consciously seeking the destruction of our nation on behalf of a foreign power.

You'll find countless articles on the Internet where competent psychologists and doctors try to understand what is wrong with the President. Why is he so aloof and detached from real people? All of these analyses miss the point.

If you want to figure out this President you have to look for the one key principle that guides his every action. And on this count, he is finally transparent. You will find this principle behind every thought, every act, every bill, every speech, every utterance and every suggestion he makes on how you can live a better life. The principle is altruism.

I think our President, unlike every President with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, has two psychological attachments: 1) to altruism and 2) to a false belief that altruism actually makes things better. He will always believe the first, but right now, he is grappling with the failure of the second.

You might recall the famous dialogue between candidate Obama and "Joe the Plumber" when he informed the electorate of his opinion that re-distributing money to some people was better for everyone. This statement received the ire of many people who see the President's view as a form of Marxism where the government violates the rights of productive people, turns them into virtual slaves and enriches those who are not self-sufficient or productive. Many see this view as the direct opposite of the principles upon which our nation was founded, ideas such as property rights, individual responsibility, voluntary trade and being able to keep the results of your work. Obama's view is altruism, the idea that people have a duty to work for the sake of others rather than themselves. With altruism, sacrifice is the hallmark of the moral life and anyone who lives for himself is considered to be a selfish brute who deserves ostracism and expropriation.

I think our President, almost instinctively, uses altruism as a way to obtain and maintain power, as if altruism is a magic formula with which no one could disagree. And about this, he is thoroughly convinced. He has even cultivated a mystique, a personality cult where you can almost see a magical aura around him, a saintly quality that ritually motivates people to work toward collective goals. In other words, his basic motivation is to encourage and achieve in every American the exact opposite of the pursuit of happiness. The President is at war with happiness. That few people realize this is why so many can’t figure him out.

I don’t think the President is aware of the oligarchic nature of his policies, the Al Capone aspect of everything he does. He does not realize that he is very much like the leader of a neighborhood gang, constantly working to enlist the love of his members, working to inspire them to die for him, to turn them into dutiful soldiers, jealous of internal and external rivals, always protecting turf with knives and guns while running an illegal protection racket.

For the President, the end, the sacrifice of every productive person in the country, justifies the means, lies, treachery and deceit. Everything he does in the name of altruism is another way to launder money to leftists, re-distribute it to his supporters while extorting it from productive business people through emergencies that he creates. His basic method of operation is to excoriate every private company, individual or activity for not caring about others.

Our President has a fixation on altruism. When speaking to college students, he tells them to go into public service rather than private business. When dealing with executives he assumes it is their duty to give in to his "superior" but non-existent wisdom. In taking over the auto companies, he criticizes investors for not sharing in the sacrifice. When addressing the sub-prime crisis, he demands that tax payers and banks pay to keep people in their homes. When taking over college loans he cavalierly assumes that tax payers should put up the money while he bribes students to do community service in return. He put millions of productive people out of work in order to pay for the Stimulus Package that created no jobs for those very same people. And he has repeatedly packed his bills with millions of dollars in pork that benefited leftist charity organizations. At every step of the way, he has offered up sacrifice as the only solution for every problem - and today all of these problems are worse than when he started.

The President does not understand what it means to pursue happiness because his entire life has been based on exhorting people to sacrifice. He does not know that the pursuit of happiness is a far superior motivation than the call to give up one's product. It is the principle that makes possible cooperation, self-interest, the rule of law and capital accumulation. It is the principle of civilized living.

Nor does he know that the perennial call to sacrifice is not a high principle, not even a principle that works; it is the lowest principle of all, a destructive and uncivilized idea, the justification used by dictators and potentates for theft, plunder, robbery and violation of honest people.

What makes him the worst President in our history is his advocacy of sacrifice as a high ideal. Contrary to his own view, his is not a morality that represents the height of intelligence, the culmination of the best education, the greatest principle ever to be learned; an idea so true that only someone truly evil and selfish would disagree. Yet, you must ask yourself, how difficult does this advocacy of sacrifice make his job as President? When the only guide a President has is the belief that "Selfishness is always the problem and sacrifice is always the solution", how aloof and detached would such a President be? Imagine that slogan on the President's desk. Yet, if this were truly the singular magic formula for Presidential problem solving, anyone could be President. Even Barack Obama. No proof required, no logic needed, just this simple non sequiter as a way of life.

Just look at the kinds of people the President has built his career around: Banks, corporations, union leaders, housing developers, college professors, politicians, government bureaucrats; everything he's done through out his career has involved dealing with people who have gotten money according to the principle of re-distribution. They have succeeded only by attaching themselves to the unearned and re-distributed dollar that government takes from hard working Americans. He's never had to make a profit, make a payroll week after week or achieve a healthy bottom line. And, more importantly, he's never experienced the joy of watching people benefit from the work of his own hands or mind.

The President has always been one step removed from the actual productive person who has fed him all his life.

If you want to know why he is out of his element in solving the Gulf oil spillage problem, this is the reason: he does not know how to solve real problems demanding real solutions because he's always invented his problems and made them into a question of selfishness vs. sacrifice. His life's purpose has always been to find those that he can blame for being selfish, protest against them, extort support from them, tax them and regulate them. When this mode of operating does not apply, he is lost and uncomfortable; and the only thing he can do to make his world right again is to politicize the issue by finding selfish villains to kick.

President Obama is a gangster of altruism.