There is no Deus Ex Machina

Deus Ex Machina

 Wall Street Journal opinion writer Jason Riley recently commented  about the new edition of Theodore Dalrymple’s 2003 book, Life at the Bottom, (A British Psychiatrist Debunks an American Racial Myth, July 21, 2026) noting that the same behaviors that affect British lower classes (the patients he saw as a doctor in the British prison system)—the drug use, promiscuity, domestic abuse, violent crime, aversion to education— also afflict many blacks in the United States as well. Mr. Riley also observes that Vice President J. D. Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, describes how the behaviors that keep “poor white trash” down in the dumps are the same behaviors keeping down inner city blacks and lower class Brits. This conclusion was also confirmed by the excellent study of the culture of poor white Americans by Charles Murray in his 2013 book Coming Apart. All of these books are backed by anecdotal descriptions, personal history and scientific studies that point to the fact that it is their culture that keeps certain people desperately poor with no hope for improvement of their situation, and not race, ethnicity or genetics. It is also not capitalism, systemic discrimination or oppression.

Hoover Institute economist, Thomas Sowell, has pointed out in many of his books the fact that blacks in America made more progress under the boot heel of Jim Crow than they did under the well-intentioned but racist assumptions of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” But don’t tell that to the Democratic Party. The Democrats have been trying to convince blacks, along with Hispanics and other gullible minorities, that Democrats are the deus ex machina that will change their lives forever. Deus ex machina (“God from the machine” in Latin), you may recall, is a theatrical device invented by the Greeks, and copied by the Romans and many others including Shakespeare, whose function is “generally to resolve an otherwise irresolvable plot situation” according to Wikipedia. And Democrats have been trying to convince poor people for decades that leftist politicians have the solution to fix the poverty and oppression that afflict them. But those poor people need to realize that , in reality, they are like the actors in a Greek drama (or worse comedy) and that in their next performance they will be confronted by the same irresolvable plot situation that they faced in the last matinee.

The Democrats, like the Greek play producers, don’t really want to solve problems, they want to sell more tickets to the next performance which, to the Democrats, is the next election. If these politicians actually solved the problems the poor people face, the poor people, no longer poor or oppressed, would no longer need the giveaway programs offered to relieve their misery and so would not only be liberated from poverty and oppression but also from Democrats. But the politicians, lusting for the power that continuation in office provides, will make sure that doesn’t happen. There will be no deus ex machina for poor blacks, whites or any other poor or oppressed minority. So if the poor oppressed people in America, or anywhere around the globe, want to be liberated from poverty and oppression they will have to do it themselves.

But how to do it? Arthur Brooks, the so-called professor of “happiness” at Harvard University, was recently interviewed on the Triggernometry podcast by the so-called comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster. But Brooks, Kisin and Foster can also deal with serious topics. Professor Brooks noted in the podcast that truly formative moments in a person’s life, the things that make life meaningful, are not beach vacations (as enjoyable as they might be) but the traumas of suffering a person must endure, the loss of a spouse or a child, the hardships of financial setbacks, difficult events that change your life. Brooks said, “ I need that suffering. I need that full experience…I want that bite out of life. I want to be fully alive. And this is one of the reasons that suffering, which is a largely right hemispheric experience, makes people understand the meaning of their lives.”

The supposed goal of deus ex machina is to eliminate the pain and suffering a person must endure to get through life. But Brooks counters, “the glory of God is a man fully alive. St. Irenaeus in the second century said, the glory of God is a person fully alive. What's a person fully alive? That's a person in pain.” Brooks, of course, is a Catholic. But he has a point.

Pain in this world may be unavoidable. But if we cannot avoid pain. The only thing we can control is how to respond to that pain and part of that is to let go of our resistance to the pain and move toward acceptance. Brooks says, “If you have high high pain but low low resistance, you can actually have very manageable suffering. And that's how the Buddhists understand suffering versus pain itself.”

The political response is to offer the deus ex machina solution but to not deliver that solution (because it is beyond the power of politicians to do so). This maximizes that resistance to pain and increases the suffering experienced, hopefully garnering more votes for the politician. But it doesn’t help the poor oppressed people seeking resolution. Again it comes back to the people themselves. They must gain the agency to resolve their own problems. The solution therefore would be to give people the tools to increase their agency, their ability to control their own lives, even at the cost of reducing the political dependency of the people.

The Democrats have been unwilling to do that. But the Democratic Socialists of America that are attempting to take over the Democratic Party are even less willing to do that. They want to sacrifice the frigidity of liberty (the ability to control your own life) for the warmth of collectiveness (giving control of your life to the collective). The MAGA Movement is little better. They want to give control of your life to a benign (at least for now) Great Leader.

There is no deus ex machina. You must choose. You must demand less of your politicians and more of yourself.