Candidate for
Council Member; City of San Clemente

Political philosophy is itself a fascinating subject to me. Probably the greatest political philosophers of all time were Plato and Aristotle. But as my old teacher Richard McKeon once said, the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle came too late to do ancient Athens any good.

Curious about Aristotle was that he hated the state, but loved the city. Aristotle thought the city (or city-state back then) existed for the purpose of enabling its citizens to enjoy "the good life." Today, I think there is much to be said for this view. But I augment it with the thought of one of the great grand daddies of the field of sociology, Emile Durkheim. Durkheim's social though might be summed up this way: we do not need society to prevent us from killing each other, as political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes presupposed. Rather, we need it to prevent each of us from killing ourselves. An individual completely cut off from society has little or no reason to live, and cannot bear it.

This is why, in the end, families and communities are not just luxuries, but life essentials. The quality of ones life, therefore, stands in direct proportion to the quality of ones community. When I was very young, studying electrical engineering at IIT, I was for a time enamored by the writings of Ayn Rand, who preached just the opposite of this. But Ayn Rand died a very lonely old woman. Her own life therefore proved that the ultimate fallacy and paradox of her brand of extreme individualism and selfishness was that it resulted in the near total destruction of the self. Likewise, her socioeconomic philosophy of deregulated "pure" capitalism, which her protege Alan Greenspan did much to put into practice over the course of a few decades. We are now witnessing the end result or *telos* of that as well.

I therefore believe that a fundamental goal of any good city should be to facilitate citizens interacting with each other in positive and productive ways. Community centers and libraries work very well toward that end. San Clemente has a very fine community center and a fine library, but both have been much outgrown in the last 20 years, with more than a doubling of our population. Just as sadly, we have no performing arts center at all. Were it not for the Cabrillo Playhouse, we'd be a total cultural dust bowl. Yet sadly, when city leaders talk about "growth" and "development," this is rarely the sort of thing they have in mind. Instead, they tend to want to run the city as though it were a business-- city revenues being the ultimate concern. While the importance of a balanced city budget cannot be overemphasized, I believe it a mistake to make that the primary focus. While "making money" is certainly an essential precondition living "the good life," equating that with "the good life" itself, it seems to me, is the sort of thing from which tragedy is born.