If one were to go from New York to London one would in New York ask for sausages whereas in London one would ask for a banger. Same food, just a different name.
In New York when you ask for a ham sandwich you get two pieces of bread and ham, and if you want mustard or whatever you better ask for it. Now in California, I believe this applies universally, one asks for a ham sandwich and one gets some exotic grain based wrapper, adorned with some strange collection of plant materials, some complex dressing with unlimited numbers of flavors and hidden in the middle, if one is lucky, is some ham. So when one from New York asks for a ham sandwich in California one has had their choices already made by some arbiter of food preparation. You get the pile of stuff. Individuality is destroyed. You get what the masses get. Thus the same name gets you different food.
In general, one could say that the difference between New York and London is that the same thing has different names. The difference between New York and Los Angeles is that the same name delivers different things. A stretch of culture. There is no dissonance between things when they have different names. There is when the different things have the same name. This observation is one of significant merit when we examine the world of politics, especially if one is totally unaware of this observation.
But it also reflects a sense of belief structures. The New York ham sandwich is the statement of pure individualism, the creation of property, and an expression of liberty. You get bread and ham, and then you get to choose. You can have mustard, butter, mayonnaise, peppers, all you have to do is ask in the transaction. In Los Angeles there is a sense of “shared community” in that someone has made all those decisions for you, like the new health care law, no choices, not just a ham sandwich, but the California concoction.
This is also exemplified when having dinner in say New York and San Francisco. In my favorite New York restaurant, I go in and ask for what I want, no menus, then they get it and we are left alone to enjoy dinner, with staff in the shadows if anything else is needed. In San Francisco, the waiter comes over, introduces himself, wants our names, suggest what to eat, what wine goes well with that and almost joins us at the table. And for that he expects remuneration. And God forbid you want a piece of fish, broiled, no butter, salt, pepper, just broiled, you are looked at as if you were from Mars. The chef after all has prepared his sauce and botanical overlays and you have committed a criminal act rejecting them and making an individual decision.
As Bastiat has said:
Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
Yes, individuality, as understood by Bastiat, by de Tocqueville, as practiced in America in the 1850s, the ability to make individual decisions and choices seems to be taken away in many areas of our lives today.Starting with my ham sandwich.
So we need the return of the ham sandwich. Just two pieces of bread, and yes you even get to choose the kind, and ham, just plain old sliced ham. You want anything else then you get to ask for it. Consider that becoming part of the way we do things.
Posts
