Making the rounds on the outrage circuit is this latest update into the continuing saga of Trump – Oh, What An Ass.

‘‘This is what it’s like to be with Trump,’’ Christie said. ‘‘He says, ‘There’s the menu, you guys order whatever you want.’ And then he says, ‘Chris, you and I are going to have the meatloaf.’’’

The big take-away we’re supposed to have is that Trump is such dickhead. How Dare He. The choice of supper entree for an enormous fat man already the subject of one failed lap banding is none of your business, sir – he has agency, you know!

Pardon me if I hesitated to clutch my pearls. As many times as this story has been passed from shocked ear to shocked ear, people missed what I found to be the pertinent lede to the story, which defined a damning study in character itself.

Trump and Christie discussed the nation’s opioid epidemic during the lunch.

Christie on Wednesday signed a series of bills he requested to address the crisis, including a five-day limit on initial prescriptions for opioids and mandating state-regulated insurance plans cover treatment.

I’m sorry, were we discussing agency here? The agency of someone afflicted with a self-inflicted morbidity known to cause early death, disorder and severe limitations on quality of life?

Oh yes. I went there.

 

 

Chris Christie believes there is an opioid epidemic. Is he correct? Possibly. To what ends? His own. If the opioid epidemic were a problem for the consumers of opioids, they’d be proposing their own solutions. They might even be doing so – we don’t know, since Top Men and the mainstream media do not appear to have invited them to the discussion. But the real problem here is that Christie ate meatloaf when he might have chosen something else. Sure.

As detailed in my earlier article, Finding the Why, humans have a talent for spotting malfunction as defined through their own worldview. We apply self-serving corrections, and then when our best-laid plans end up tattered wrecks, we blame everyone else for the failure.

I, personally, believe Chris Christie needs to put the snacks down and take the stairs more often. I am fully confident that if he does not do so, his life will be needlessly shortened and suffer a loss of quality. I might even be right. So, tell me, America – at what point do I get to override Governor Christie’s agency in order to apply my corrections to his choices?

In my opinion, I don’t.

 

If he wants to be a great big fat bastard, that’s his problem. Nothing to do with me. But what about his elevated healthcare costs, due specifically to his bad lifestyle choices and now foisted onto the backs of taxpayers? Who, exactly, paid for Governor Christie’s surgery; the one that didn’t work?

 

Red herring. If we all eat enough of them, we’ll be thin as rails. The problem isn’t that Christie has a sweetheart Cadillac healthcare plan exempted from Obamacare’s onerous health-damaging idiocies, at the expense of people who lack such privilege. The problem isn’t even that he uses this sweet privilege to rectify the self-inflicted abuse of his body. The problem is that government picks my pocket to enrich people who think lunch should be not merely free, but an all-you-can-eat buffet. Those who rob Peter to pay Paul, will always have the support of Paul.

Is the analogy too subtle? Perhaps it is. In the abundance of articles about poor, poor Christie’s stolen agency, not one thus far to mine eyes has pointed out these astonishing parallels. Christie is upset at the loss of his own agency, while taking others’ agency away with both hands and the expectation of applause.

Governor Christie is the very thing against which he rails. He merely has trouble seeing this clearly, since he is as convinced of his own narrative rightness as every other human on the planet. He is the good guy, because that’s what his head tells him is so.

Being the good guy isn’t a side, a team. It doesn’t come with the proper hand-waving to paper over what you did with a thin veneer of respectability and concern. It’s an action. Those who do bad things are not the good guys. Everything from there is rationalization.

Prediction: If an opioid epidemic exists, it will not be cured by talking at opioid consumers coupled with the proper removal of just exactly the right set of agencies from the correct people, handing that power over to some bureaucrat whose claim to fame is a bachelors degree in fine arts and a cushy job divorced from the requirement for functional results. What we’ll get then is another set of dysfunctions, and more people insistent that more money and and more power to the people who caused the new problems are the next sole best solution.

If there is an opioid epidemic, we’d be best served to start with finding the why.

Why are more people consuming more opioids? If consumption has reached levels causing individual health concerns, why has that individual come to the conclusion that this was the most effective cure for their pain despite the risk-reward calculation? Lest anyone labor under the delusion that only people making good and proper social normie choices make risk-reward calculations, allow me to disabuse them of that notion. Everyone makes risk-reward calculations. The man drinking himself to death knows it. This choice nevertheless appears, to his mind, to be the most effective option available. If this calculation fails to make sense, I’d suggest asking him to explain it rather than assuming we know everything about the matter and can solve that problem for him.

Chris Christie post-surgery is still grossly obese. If you want to know why, don’t ask his surgeon; ask Christie.

Therein lies our real solutions. Taking away the proper agencies and handing more power and money to people ill-equipped to use them will solve nothing. Such actions have, in fact, gotten us to this state of disorder and chaotic whack-a-mole with accompanying enormous and rising costs; both fiscal and societal.

We need to start involving those who we purport to assist. Not at them and to them, but with them, will these problems be solved. Every individual has agency, and re-labeling people as sub-human and otherwise lesser-than to excuse our actions in taking away their individuality does not make us the good guys.

It makes us psychopaths.

The… characteristics referred to as antisocial personality in the FBI report were as follows: sense of entitlement, unremorseful, apathetic to others, unconscionable, blameful of others, manipulative and conning, affectively cold, disparate understanding of behavior and socially acceptable behavior, disregardful of social obligations, nonconforming to social norms, irresponsible. These… were not simply persistently antisocial individuals who met DSM-IV criteria for ASPD; they were psychopaths- remorseless predators who use charm, intimidation and, if necessary, impulsive and cold-blooded violence to attain their ends.

We are eating the very people we claim to help because it feeds our narrative and increases power and money in one direction only. The stated goals are never reached, and the subjects loathe us for our efforts; this is natural, since we are not helping them, that’s just our rationalization of our bad choices. This is tribal monkey behavior with evolved vocabulary, not civilized humanity.

Civilization is a choice. Let’s choose it.