Recently I had reason to spend a lot of time interacting with the federal government. My errand involved me walking the corridors of a federal agency, and to relieve the tedium, I found myself noticing people’s office décor. One man’s door said tersely, “The house is burning. Let us warm ourselves.” Another quoted Asimov saying that anti-intellectualism in America consists of the notion that democracy means that my inaccuracy is as good as your facts. One woman had turned her reception desk into an oasis of green: live plants everywhere, pictures of her family and friends, a gathering of little plastic bugs in constant motion.

Then I noticed an office that sported the immortal question, “Who is John Galt?”

I have to admit I was seriously taken aback. This was a federal employee. I want to maintain anonymity, so I’m not going to furnish any further clues to the person’s identity except to say that my stunned disbelief was later exacerbated by discovering that the person in question had worked for the federal government all their life.

OK, there’s no rule against libertarians or Randians working for the federal government, because those of us still clinging to the tattered notions of a civil society believe in people’s right to make a living regardless of their political opinions. In fact, we believe that other people’s political opinions only fall within our purview under very specific circumstances: when they lead to abuse of our own rights, or when we’re debating in public space: at which point, if you love democracy, or even the Republic, you pray for the biggest rip-roaring argument possible. Democracy must be rational, should be civic, and can even be polite, but it should never walk on eggshells.

But downtown Washington DC is a very long way from Galt’s Gulch. As a matter of fact, it may be impossible to get any farther from Galt’s Gulch. I mean, isn’t Washington DC the place where all the lights of civilization go out while the people watch from Galt’s Gulch as the world falls into darkness, in the most self-congratulatory narrative spectacle I’ve seen outside the Left Behind novels?

UPDATE: Actually, I misremembered; it's New York City where the readers, and the people rescuing Galt, watch the lights go out. For some reason they aren't watching on TV from the Gulch. You'd think superscientists with an infinite energy source would have a way of monitoring the heathen outside the walls, but I guess not. (This is what happens when you don't want to re-read a book.) Nonetheless, a lifelong post working for the federal government in Washington, D.C., is STILL a very long way from Galt's Gulch.

The connection there is more than incidental. There’s something fundamentalist Christians and Randians have in common, which is a voyeuristic fetish for apocalypse. The select few get to sit behind their walls and watch while the rest of the world falls into torment, darkness, and death. "We were so right," is what their response seems to be; "All this just proves how much better we are than them." It’s also worth noting that this self-congratulatory nastiness actually reverses the central premise of Christianity, which is God subjecting himself to torment, darkness and death so as to extend a message of transformation and salvation to the world. But this is the place where Wall St, fundamentalist Christians, and Randians come together: the notion of meritocracy. The sheep get saved and get to live in bliss; the much more numerous goats get flung into hell—and the central message is that this is just, right, and indeed inevitable. ("The fact that all those people lost their houses just proves I’m smarter than they are," said the Wall St broker anonymously to a journalist in 2008.) In other words, if you were a sheep, you wouldn’t be suffering; the fact that you’re suffering proves you’re a goat. Into the fire with you. Isn’t that what happens to waste?

Be very careful when people say they want to eliminate waste.

Oddly enough, the notion that one could suffer because other people are suffering, or because the world is suffering, seems to have missed these people entirely. The central fact of Christianity itself depends on this premise: For God so loved the world, the Bible explains, he turned himself into a human being and suffered one of the worst deaths humankind has devised. All because he couldn’t stand watching something he loved destroy itself.

I’m talking a lot about Christianity for someone who hasn’t been a Christian for nearly 25 years. But at the risk of sounding like a right-winger, it’s an inescapable truth that Christianity is a large part of the cultural background of this country and its ideas and stories have seeped into even secular parts of the culture. Some of those ideas and stories have migrated thus in their most twisted versions, and I’m arguing that one of these is the central argument of our time: the notion of the elect. The chosen people. This is a concept inextricably tied to the notion of an inferior, unwanted majority, and as such, it is anathema to democracy or even republicanism of any kind.

It also explains why most of the rich are so willing to allow climate catastrophe to destroy the planet’s capacity to support human life; they know they aren’t going to drown in the Lake of Fire; that doesn’t happen to people like them. They’ll get to watch while all the inferior dross burns away. Why any decent human being would want to watch such a thing is a question that is increasingly difficult to ask, as the moral framework for that question gets whittled away by the notion that only fools ask questions about human decency anyway. Sure, we tortured some folks, but don’t get all sanctimonious about it. (If you believe in the elect, “torturing some folks” isn’t a problem; the chosen people don’t get tortured. Only goats face the fire.)

You can apply this framework, this overarching narrative, to almost every piece of perfidy that’s been done in the public sphere in the past 30 years. The two-tier justice system is another example. The elect have already been pre-judged innocent and good; that’s why they’re the elect. You can tell who they are by their skin color, the size and number of their bank accounts, and whether or not they carry a badge. You can also tell who they are by whether or not they inconveniently disagree with the arbitrary division of sheep and goats, and use words like “unfair,” “unconstitutional,” and “atrocity.”

But the interesting thing is that the original parable of sheep and goats didn’t go like that at all. I’m quoting from a memory long past, but I remember some words like “`Depart from me, ye cursed, into the fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me not to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me not to drink; I was sick, and without a home, and you did not take me to your house; I was naked and you did not clothe me; I was in prison, and you did not visit me.’ And they will say to him, `Lord when saw we you hungry, or thirsty, or in need, and did not minister unto thee?’ And he will say, `Inasmuch as you did it not unto the least of these my brethren, you did it not unto me.’”

I don’t believe in hells ordained by gods, nor in separating humans into sheep and goats and throwing the baddies into the fire. But if you accept the terms of the story, what defines a goat is their inability to see the connection of all things, the identification of the highest with the lowest, and to act with decency, compassion and generosity out of that knowledge.

I doubt there are many people on this board who have any fondness for the Kerrys, but along with assorted quotes from the Bible, Ursula LeGuin, Tolkien, James Joyce, and the Declaration of Independence, this quotation from Teresa Heinz lives in my head and heart. She is talking about the lesson she learned from her first visit to the rainforest:

The most amazing experience for me was to stand beneath the jungle canopy towering 120 feet overhead. It truly had the feeling and simplicity of a gothic cathedral. The trees were like pillars, often anchored by buttress-like roots. They grew in a mere six inches of soil. You couldn't help but wonder what sustained them, and then you looked at the ground and saw the interplay of mosses, ferns, mushrooms, insects and animals, and you began to understand the beauty and complexity and interdependence of life.
We are, all of us, like those trees. Even they depend on the kindness of strangers, and so it is for us.
No matter how high we may sometimes soar, no matter how invincible we may sometimes feel, we are all fed and nurtured and sustained by complex webs of connection. We all truly are in this together.
That, of course, is the essential but too often forgotten wisdom that lies at the heart of all the world's great religions-that we should love others as we love ourselves. And it is the wisdom at the heart of all true charity and philanthropy.