The world owes me a living

But there is no longer anything unusual in Saudi Arabia's discovery that there are quicker roads to wealth than sheer luck or pure merit. The producers owe the spongers a living, says the new ethic; what's more, there is a two-pronged strategy that will make it stick: One, fan the envy and greed of your fellow-spongers; two, saddle the producers with a gigantic guilt complex.

Saudi Arabia is a minor strand in this general pattern; its more important parts are being woven by the Western would-be intellectuals who have become hostile to the society that let them become spongers themselves. For every Yasir Arafat, there is a Daniel Berrigan who rationalizes murder in the name of "higher laws;" for every Idi Amin there are five sensitive college professors who relate, raise awareness and are responsive to legitimate aspirations.

It would be nice and simple to blame it all on a "communist conspiracy." But communism is but one of several ideologies using the guilt/envy strategy, a primitive creed rooted in Soviet military might. There are more effective guilt/envy ideologies that have no need of Soviet bayonets to brainwash immature minds.

Not so long ago, Reich's Greening of America was fashionable; so was Hoffman's Steal This Book. Charles Reich is a Harvard professor who advocated speeding the "self-destruction of the system" by taking walks round the block while drawing a salary; Abbie Hoffman, now wanted for drug pushing and jumping bail, gave advice on how to steal a free dinner. But beyond such minor details we can see little basic difference between the attitudes of Charles Reich, the Harvard professor, and Abbie Hoffman, the bum.

Both books are now forgotten, but others take their place. They all cry out for the civil liberties of the mugger, but not of the mugged; they all despise the technology without which their authors would have to canvass from cave to cave; they all blur the difference between justice and injustice ("it's all a relative value judgement!"); they all attack and despise what some call the Judeo-Christian work ethic, but most just call common decency. They all, in other words, attack the very roots of civilization as we have known it.

The intense controversies over energy are a part of an overall pattern. An important part; but still only a part of a more general pattern.