Idiots Rule America

John Ralston Saul

“I’ve talked to several Supreme Court justices, several times in several countries and I say, look, in your rulings, can you differentiate easily in cases between the social contract and the commercial contract, and to which the answer is, we can no longer differentiate. And that lies at the heart of the problem.

“You don’t have the concept of the other, and of obligation of the individual leading to individualism.

‘You can’t have that if the whole legal system has slipped over the last, really, 50 years, increasingly, to a confusion between the social contract and the commercial contract. Because they are two completely different things.

“The social contract is about the public good, responsible individualism, imagining the other. The commercial contract is a commercial contract. They’re not supposed to be confused. They don’t actually fit together.

“The commercial contract only works properly when the social contract also works in a democracy.”