Empowerment on Wall Street and beyond

I have come to hate the word, “empowerment”. I encounter it just about every time I walk down the hall of a school building. I read it constantly. The function of school is to “empower” students. The function of government is to “empower” citizens. To be adequate parents, we must “empower” our children.
Everyone, it seems, to be whole and healthy must have a sense of empowerment. So we are told, taught and retold again.
Oh. Why?
Children are born with an all too vigorous sense of empowerment. “Daddy” and “Mommy” may be the first words they learn, but “Mine!” certainly comes soon after. It’s a rare child that doesn’t instinctively push others aside to get his own.
Look at the un-grown-ups on Wall Street that – left unregulated and uncontrolled – just pushed us into a trillion dollar debt to bail them out of the mess their sense of empowerment got us into in the first place. Our bankers could certainly use less feeling of being empowered.
Oh, but I will be told, empowerment is a basic American right. It’s part of our heritage.
Find that notion anywhere in the Constitution. Quite the contrary! The writers of that document full well realized that what a citizen needs to function in a democracy is less empowerment and more sense of responsibility. The government created in 1787 was designed to restrain and restrict empowerment, not foment it. The Bill of Rights grants specific freedoms – not empowerment.
In fact the framers of our government were so uncertain about citizen empowerment that they gave citizens the right only to vote for members of the House. Citizens were not deemed responsible enough to vote for members of the Senate – whose job it was to delay and deliberate on what the peoples’ representatives might have rushed to enact.
Nor could citizens vote for the president. A college of what it was hoped would be the wisest men in the country were to be elected to choose the chief executive. Citizens were (and are) given no say what-so-ever in the selection of the judiciary.
That shows no concern for empowerment. The men who wrote the Constitution had just lived through a revolution. They saw first hand what groups of greedy citizens could do to each other when overcome with a sense of empowerment. Some of those men may have stood guard over their neighbors’ houses to prevent gangs of “patriots” from looting them in a frenzy of wealth redistribution.
(History books don’t stress that side of the revolution.) The Constitutionists efforts to restrain empowerment run rampant produced an amazing document that has kept us on track for over two centuries. It works – splendidly.
Other nations whose concern actually was “empowerment” – notably France – have seen governments collapse in riot after riot. Study the history of France since 1789.
Nor is the proper function of either school or parent to inculcate any sense of empowerment. The infant comes with that built in. When you allow him or her to get out of the house, through school and all the way to Wall Street without being reined in, you wind up owing a trillion or more.
Home is the place where the little ball of greed and selfishness you birthed is to learn restraint. A major function of the home is to civilize the newborn barbarian. You teach him the art of the knife and fork, you keep him from bashing his little friends. You even have to convince him that he must drive on this side of the road and not that.
He must pick up after himself. She cannot be permitted to say “No” to certain directives – for the safety of society. Chores must be done or the home, like society at large, collapses. Certain behaviors – violence, narcotics use, self-destructive acts – may not be tolerated.
This is not empowerment. This is regulation. This is enforced restraint. They are designed to teach self-control. Without it, democracy cannot function. Without it, a system of total control becomes necessary and is demanded by the citizens.
Schools must recognize the same reality. Schoolwork must be done. Rules of mathematics and chemistry must be followed. Rules of behavior must be enforced. A child may not be permitted to look you in the eye and say, “You can’t make me.”
Otherwise he will believe there is nothing he can be made to do when he gets to Wall Street or to the streets of any city. Then, sadly, sometimes empowerment stops with a set of handcuffs.