So what do Moammar Ghaddafi and Charlie Sheen have in common? Well, they both apparently in the last couple of weeks have undergone complete psychotic breakdowns, through a combination of stress, drugs and previous mental problems; but since both are rich and world-famous, they've been allowed to have their breakdowns in full view of the global public, and have been surrounded by fawning and preening sane people who have treated every crazy word as serious for ulterior motives. And I have to say, this is something that really bothers me about human nature, and especially here in America in the last thirty years, our endless capacity for worshipping random strangers in an almost godlike fashion for largely random reasons, which is then used as a justification for gleefully hurling rocks at these people the moment their pedestal starts to wobble, which is itself justified by continuing to worship them, making them even richer and more famous than they were before. And the reason it's so insidious is that everyone's at fault but not a single person will admit it; we all decry how much that poor crazy Sheen has been plastered all over the front pages, yet we all giggle along with the apocalyptic latest, the newest sign that he's now one step closer to his undoubtedly messy homicide/suicide demise.

It's had me thinking again about a philosophical question that's been on my mind ever since the end of the Bush years and the economic collapse and all that, now two and a half years ago; of how you even begin to punish a nation's worth of people at once, if that entire nation is guilty of committing some kind of horrible crime or another. Because I'm convinced that in the future, historians will see the unchecked darkness that has so far defined the 21st century not as a matter of a few huge ethical transgressions, but rather a hundred million tiny small ones; a hundred million Americans out of the approximately 400 million the country currently holds who were dicks during the Bush years exactly one time when they didn't need to be, simply because they could get away with it. The hundred million authority figures who used their petty little power to officially make one stranger's day just a little bit worse, simply because. The hundred million people who tried to censor or shut up someone else for their opinions or lifestyle. The hundred million people who took a bribe, who ran a scam, who "flipped condos" because they had been told it was a fast and sure-fire way to make a quick profit. The hundred million corporate executives committing sins behind the closed doors of skyscraper offices, the cartoonishly unbelievable stuff of bad fiction -- having orgies, snorting coke off iPhones, taking the corporate jet halfway around the world to have a thousand-dollar cocktail at a dictator's luxury hotel on the company's expense account.

Or, if you want to look at it in terms of people who really don't think they're also guilty -- the hundred million people who day-traded risky stocks in get-rich-quick schemes, brought on by screaming "experts" on a constant exposure loop via cable television. The hundred million middle-classers who collected dividends on mutual funds made up of bundled bad loans. The hundred million lower-classers who accepted those bad loans, knowing full well that they couldn't afford them. The hundred million people who handed out these bad loans like candy, to any random stranger who walked in, doled out from behind bulletproof windows in concrete huts in the middle of rundown neighborhoods, specifically to the uneducated and desperate. The hundred million political moderates who completely ignored the mustache-twirling politics of Bushism/Tea-Partyism altogether, in order to bury their heads in the sand and read their Boing Boing and tweet about their startups and bake their fucking cupcakes, their precious little Brooklyn organic bike-delivered fucking cupcakes, and who cares if the world is falling apart because look at this yummy vegan burrito I made! This is my whole point, that not a single one of us is completely innocent, even as every single one of us smugly proclaims in public that we are. And usually when a crime is discovered, there's a culprit to be caught and definitively punished, delivering what we think of as "justice;" but how do you achieve justice when it's a hundred million culprits who are all just a tiny bit guilty?

After thinking about it for two years now, I suppose the answer is exactly what you've been seeing in this country lately. The way to punish a hundred million guilty people is to create an economic crisis that literally won't end, precisely because the people it's affecting can't make even the tiniest step forward as to finding a viable solution, with every proposal actually a thinly-veiled partisan political maneuver, designed more for "punishing" their ideological "enemy" than in trying to find an actual solution. You punish them by saddling a decent President with millions of conspiracy nuts and conservative Christians who are convinced that he's literally the Biblical Antichrist, fueled heavily by sociopathic media titans who happily erase the line between objective journalism and crazed ranting, thus giving immediate legitimacy to what would otherwise be the ignored shouts of a shirtless corner panhandler. (And it's not just conservatives who are guilty of this; look at all the former liberal Obama supporters who have abandoned him just two years later for being "not radical enough," their own rantings rationalized by the lefty version of these sociopathic media empires.)

And so what's the solution? How do we finally stop the collective punishment? Well, as far as I can tell, the best proposal seems to be the one that hearkens all the way back to such Eastern religions as Taoism, which is the same thing that fuels most liberal forms of Christianity, which not by coincidence seems to also be the guiding principle behind the "atheist religion" known as Existentialism; namely, worry about yourself, both in terms of not being so obsessed with the sins of others, and in terms of not letting other people tell you how to live your own life. In fact, I think it's no coincidence that the greatest Existentialist book ever written, Albert Camus' 1947 The Plague, is a direct response to the question of how the French were exactly supposed to think of the Nazi occupation of their country a few years previous, now that it was all over and they were back to being an independent nation again, one that had just recently been split between vicious Fascists and those waging an underground war against them, very similar to the issues we're dealing with (or, er, not dealing with) in America these days, of how exactly we become a post-Bush society, of how to become morally clean again after being so morally dirty just a decade ago.

The answer lies in no longer letting other people define "right" and "wrong" for us, "success" and "failure." It lies in then sticking to these definitions of right and wrong once we come up with them, to not abandon our sense of right and wrong just because of this or that, because you need the money or because someone came up with a clever justification for it. ("It's not 'torture,' it's 'enhanced interrogation.'" NO. IT'S TORTURE. I KNOW WHAT TORTURE IS, AND THAT IS TORTURE, NO MATTER HOW MANY FANCY WORDS YOU COME UP WITH FOR IT.) It lies with doing what the Buddhists and Quakers and Humanists do, not try to convert strangers but simply live your own life as well as possible, so that others will voluntarily approach and ask to learn more. And for God's sake, it lies with breaking the Charlie Sheen Cycle, to stop ridiculing the famous at their lowest points then buying all their stuff, then ridiculing them then buying all their stuff. People, that isn't funny, and nothing's going to get better in this country until you at least do that, at least stop giggling at the antics of the rich and mentally unstable. It's just not funny.