When considering the strategies of the two competing national parties in America during the last eight years of discourse, its good to recall Dunbar’s Number to help explain many of the actions taken, while they seem out of context.

Pre-dating this tumultuous period following 9/11, the Democrats had seemed like a group who actually had strategic plans against the Republicans. Post-9/11, however, things changed quickly and a lot of decisions were made without questioning the long-term outcomes of the ramifications of war in Afghanistan and later, Iraq.

The Democrats suddenly fully backed entering into these wars, fully privatizing them, surely with hopes of this being a profitable windfall for the American people. Not only would American companies be revitalized and producing weaponry, armor, and medicine for these new wars, but we would walk away with a huge stake in the dwindling world oil market.

When folks like myself sit and wonder how the government and many American companies would bankrupt the American people on such a whim, I catch myself wondering what it really must feel like to be in their shoes.

So, I must take Dunbar’s Number into consideration. If I am a rich mogul, or perhaps a US Senator, my outlook on the world is definitively shaped by the world I exist in. There are a finite number of human beings who are “real” to me. If I am in such a position of power, likely all those people who are important to me are also rich, powerful, and have stake in this war. Most of the people involved could stand to profit directly or indirectly, thus I would begin to think “Ah, if this war is profitable for me and everyone I know, then this war must be profitable for America and the world at large.” This is the underlying ideology that is unspoken but speaks greatly of our reliance on Reaganomics even today.

Business and government with only short-term profit goals and a perverse view of “trickle down economics” come from residing in a society where the controlling powers never actually interact with the majority of the American population, let alone experience their way of life or know what it means to live in poverty. Because everyone in their reality is rich and profiting from what they are doing, it seems completely unreasonable to them that people could be doing badly. Those people must just be “lazy” or “unskilled.” Not a surprising view to take considering recent studies showing that, while the rich express more happiness with their lives, they generally take much less time enjoying life with leisure activities. More time spent working and making things happen, scheduling and networking.

The frightening thing is that so many Americans bought into this way of thinking against their own interests. Only now are more people beginning to realize that everything they thought is a sham. While they thought American hegemony was on the increase, it’s been on the decline, with policies like war, privatization, deregulation, etc. have been at once attempts to remain powerful and at the same time partial causes of, or at least accelerators of, the decline.

But these attempts to remain powerful themselves are driven by a delusional ideology produced by Dunbar’s Number. They cannot see past the people they themselves know, and cannot see how many of the new laws they enact make it more and more difficult for the average middle-class American citizen. They feel like they are making huge concessions to the public giving the citizens as much leeway as they do. This twisted sense of entitlement most often comes from this complete lack of understanding the social situations of the middle-class, or the “Other.”

How the middle class came to believe in these same ideas is more confusing. It was likely the consolidation of media with the military industrial complex, with many national media outlets now owned in whole or in part by companies who profit from war. With the media as a veritable propaganda machine for the interests of short-term profit, the fanfare leading up to war makes sense. As television has been (up until more recently) the most relied upon source for Americans to get their information, it is understandable that it had a heavy influence on the anti-intellectualized masses.

Now, as the short-term profits of The War Against Terror lag, we see more media outlets becoming “suspicious” of the war and decrying its social consequences. This only comes as the short-term profits are migrating to a new sector as we find out we got into more of a mess than our military could handle. While we have secured a future of “Oil Partnership” with Iraq, the instability of the region makes it difficult to profit quickly from such investments. As always with Reaganomics, business then turns to a new short-term goal, with intent on making windfall profits as quickly as possible.

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Now, considering Dunbar’s Number, we also have to stop and realize its influence on the way we view this situation. As struggling middle class Americans, are we jaded against the culture of the rich and powerful because they are things we lack? I tend to think not. The reason I do not consider myself jaded is because I do not want the rich, powerful, elite and highly educated to give up that which they have. What I want is to live in a world where those things are more evenly distributed and we give more people the opportunity to excell in many fields of education and work. Equal opportunity education is probably most important, for while many great minds exist, many of them never achieve a great education due to the impoverished status of their parents. Reliance upon family instead of a greater reliance on society to help itself as a whole renders a caste society where it is more and more unlikely for us to be able to break the bonds of our social class.