Spero Consulting

William McGurn has an excel­lent col­umn in today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal. It is enti­tled, “My Big Fat Gov­ern­ment Takeover.”

In the col­umn, he decries those in favor of gov­ern­men­tal solu­tions to all man’s ills, and he men­tions that lack of humil­ity of those like Pres­i­dent Obama and his ilk, who believe that a few “smart” peo­ple with cen­tral­ized power can solve the nation’s (and the world’s) prob­lems. (Yet, they can’t pre­vent party-​crashers to a state din­ner. Good luck with that.)

We want to empha­size the hubris (and the mis­guided and mis­placed faith in them­selves) because it is the per­fect mes­sage on this date, Decem­ber 8, the Feast of the Immac­u­late Conception.

Whether know­ingly, by coin­ci­dence or through the Grace of God, Mr. McGurn’s col­umn relates well to the bible read­ings (and we’re sure to many of the hom­i­lies) on this Holy Day of Oblig­a­tion for Catholics.

As many Catholics know – and all of them should know – today is the Feast of the Immac­u­late Con­cep­tion, which cel­e­brates Mary’s con­cep­tion and per­pet­ual state of grace. (A fair num­ber of Catholics con­fuse the Immac­u­late Con­cep­tion with the Annun­ci­a­tion, when Mary is vis­ited by the Angel Gabriel, and learns (and accepts) that she is to be the mother of our Lord. That’s partly their fault for not pay­ing atten­tion and partly because the Gospel read­ing for today is, in fact, the Annunciation.)

The first read­ing, from the Book of Gen­e­sis, recounts Man’s Fall from Grace, while Luke’s Gospel of the Annun­ci­a­tion gives the Angel Gabriel’s greet­ing, “Hail, full of Grace! The Lord is with you.”

The fail­ure to con­sider and appre­ci­ate that dis­tinc­tion between her grace and the Fallen Nature of every other per­son is why big-​government solu­tions always fails – either in the short-​term due to bureau­cratic inep­ti­tude or in the long-​term due to total­i­tar­i­an­ism (or both). In the extreme cases of total­i­tar­i­an­ism, when the gov­ern­ment attempts to get rid of the imper­fect true-​believers in it, there is no short­age of imper­fect folks to elim­i­nate. That, of course, is the impe­tus for the gulags and the killing fields.

Because we attended this morning’s Mass for the parish school’s chil­dren, our excel­lent new Parochial Vicar – who recently replaced our excel­lent and trans­ferred Parochial Vicar and friend, Fr. Sean – tried to empha­size that dis­tinc­tion between the grace of Mary and every­one is the Church– and the world, for that matter.

He asked the stu­dents three ques­tions: (1) How many of you always lis­ten to your par­ents and do as they ask? (2) How many of you always lis­ten to your teach­ers and do as they ask? And (3) How many of you always lis­ten to God and do as he asks?

Either out of (1) hubris or (2) incor­rectly antic­i­pat­ing the answers that he sought or (3) con­sid­er­ing which of Santa’ lists they hoped to be on so very near to Christ­mas, many of the younger chil­dren answered affir­ma­tively to all three questions.

Our priest then asked sim­i­lar ques­tions to the par­ents and other adults present, and no hands were raised. In fact, like every other priest that we know, he admit­ted to being a sin­ner and noted that he could not raise his hand for any of the questions.

That’s makes us won­der why those seek­ing cen­tral­ized solu­tions would (likely) answer in con­cert with first-​graders in the pews rather than with the adults?

By itself, there’s no prob­lem think­ing that you’re bet­ter than oth­ers. In many sit­u­a­tions, a healthy self-​confidence in one’s God-​given abil­i­ties is often a nec­es­sary con­di­tion for success.

The prob­lem is that much of the empir­i­cal evi­dence one observes about one­self often doesn’t sup­port that hypothesis.

So rather than inter­nal­iz­ing those flaws, an eas­ier way to main­tain the dis­tinc­tion or mirage of supe­ri­or­ity is to demo­nize oth­ers and attribute the basest of motives and behav­iors to them. In other words, imme­di­ately believe the worst that you hear about them, while main­tain­ing skep­ti­cism when you’re told good things about them.

A friend of ours men­tioned that prior to serv­ing as the head of a rather con­tentious orga­ni­za­tion, he would often view those with oppos­ing view­points as being either evil or stu­pid or both. After being lob­bied by both sides of var­i­ous issues for a few years, he real­ized that folks can have dif­fer­ent opin­ions and per­spec­tives and objec­tives with­out nec­es­sar­ily being evil or stu­pid. (We joke that those who dis­agree with us need not be evil or stu­pid, they may sim­ply be igno­rant and not know any better.)

In that regard, we would hope that both the faith­ful and non-​believers could agree with the first phrase of Alexan­der Pope’s famous quote: “To err is human…”

And, like Mr. McGurn, we would hope that indi­vid­u­als with respon­si­bil­ity for var­i­ous social, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ics orga­ni­za­tions would take their own flaws and the flaws of oth­ers into con­sid­er­a­tion when design­ing insti­tu­tions and poli­cies for those insti­tu­tions. After all, that type of orga­ni­za­tional and man­age­r­ial con­trol is one of our spe­cial­ties at Spero Consulting.