JULY 17, 2024 – For the Fourth of July our neighbor John was kind enough to accommodate some of our guests by opening up one of the seldom-used cabins on his compound, which borders our land on the other side of the “swamp woods.” In one of the bedrooms was a chalkboard on which someone (probably one of John’s daughters or sons-in-law, since John didn’t claim credit for it himself) had written the first half of a sentence and left the bottom half of the board for a guest to finish the axiom. The first half read, “The secret to having it all is . . .”
I thought about it for a few seconds, then picked up a nearby piece of chock and wrote, “not wanting it all.”
On the drive home from the Red Cabin today, nearly two weeks later, I reflected on the completed sentence and how it addressed a very deep-rooted and consequently stubborn aspect of American culture: “Having it all” is a quintessentially American trait.
We are subject to a constant barrage of effective marketing to make us believe that as Americans, we can indeed “have it all.” The irony is that while other people seem to “have it all,” few of us think that we ourselves “have it all.” The reason, of course, is that almost no one in our culture feels secure or satisfied with “enough”—unless they’ve eschewed all exposure to all advertising and marketing efforts by interests that need and want to sell more stuff and services.
No matter how “good we have it”—“it” covering everything from personal achievement to public recognition and from mental and physical health to social and material wealth—we want more. Though this phenomenon might well be common to many cultures besides our own, ours is uniquely geared to 1. Make us think we can “have it all,” and 2. Remind us that we’ll never have enough. In large part this dichotomy is what drives our economy: we’re always striving, never satisfied.
As the miles went by, I applied this idea of “having it all” to politics. In a country as large and complex as ours, democracy will function successfully only with give-and-take, with what’s become a dirty word at both ends of the political spectrum: “compromise.” Compromise can’t occur if stakeholders insist on “having it all.” If citizens in a democracy believe they can achieve their policy agenda without compromise, they are sure to be disappointed, whereupon, one of two ultimate outcomes ensues. Either the uncompromising parties become disillusioned and lose faith in democracy or they become extremists and in the process of trying to “have it all,” work to undo democracy.
Whether in our personal strivings or in restoring civility, moderation, and vitality to our democracy, I’m convinced that “The secret to having it all, is not wanting it all.”
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
