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Editor's note: A version of this article appeared in The Republic, 19 August 2004.

Recently I saw Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 for a second time. If Moore's arguments are correct, then the Bush dynasty has padded its pockets through deception, manipulation of the political process, economic conspiracy, and military conquest. Thinking about the traumas the Bush family has inflicted in its pursuit of its private interests, and of the widespread rage these traumas have ignited, I was reminded of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Or The Modern Prometheus.

Consider Frankenstein's plot. In the unrestrained pursuit of his narcissistic obsessions, Victor Frankenstein, a product of a wealthy and somewhat incestuous family, gives birth to a creature of incomparable ugliness. Frankenstein disavows responsibility for his creation, and secludes himself within the comforts of his family's estate. Reviled and abused, the heartbroken monster beseeches its creator: "Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be... Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred."

When Frankenstein rejects the monster, it embarks upon a campaign of terror, killing Frankenstein's family, then luring the doctor to his death in the Arctic Circle. The book ends with the monster grieving over Frankenstein's body, fully aware of the tragedy. Loathing its own existence and bereft of hope for a "place" in society, Frankenstein's deformed child awaits its own demise in the polar winter.

In his essay, "Liberty, Equality, Monstrosity: Revolutionising the Family in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," David A. Hedrich Hirsch argues that it critiques the way mercy is hoarded within families, leaving outsiders to damnation and torment. Today, such practice is rationalized by the "family values" movement. As Margaret Thatcher expressed it, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." These sentiments, which seem to underlie the insular ethics of the Bush dynasty, are a radical departure from most anthropological thought, which sees societies, and the emotional attachments supporting them, as fundamental features of human existence.

The family values movement teaches people to be loyal only to their own kin, and to pursue familial interests without concern for a larger society. Stephanie Coontz writes in The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Perseus Books Group, 1992), "Love of family... could justify almost any kind of behavior towards strangers. For more than a hundred years, 'I did it all for you' has been a legitimate male defense against a woman's tentative objections to any of his actions in business and politics... Autobiographies of early capitalist entrepreneurs demonstrate that there was a close connection between intense family sentiment and competitive business ambitions." At the same time, the family values movement ignores the social foundations of family privilege. Coontz argues that even American pioneer families relied heavily on "massive federal land grants, government-funded military mobilizations that dispossessed hundreds of Native American societies and confiscated half of Mexico, and state-sponsored economic investment in new lands."

Given this, it shouldn't surprise us that followers of the movement embrace a process of corporate globalization that's multiplying the ranks of the impoverished and oppressed both at home and abroad, and undermining the social and environmental foundations upon which economies and nations are built. Neither should we be surprised by their paranoia about those outside their families' privileged circles, a paranoia typically expressed through nationalism, which is simply the modern expression of tribalism. Conservatives, like Frankenstein, must realize they've traded love for hatred, and that their victims have a superhuman capacity for vengeance.

Fahrenheit 9/11 demonstrates what happens when family values are taken to their logical conclusion. By accumulating wealth and power at the expense of a global society, the Bushes have mangled the lives of many millions, both domestically and internationally. Their spiritual mutilation is breeding rage where there was once a chance for friendship, and has unleashed a catastrophic cycle of violence.

In fact, the problem the global society faces extends well beyond the Bush dynasty to the very heart of our global societal order, an order historically founded upon "family values." As it's grown, that order's become exceedingly precarious. Today, our ecological niche is quickly mutating, our international economic system is increasingly turbulent, and the means of mass destruction are becoming more powerful, more accessible, and harder to control. The chaos that was once confined to subjugated nations is increasingly threatening the so-called "First World."

In the midst of this, people are losing hold of their potentials for compassion and happiness. According to pollster Michael Adams, author of Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and the Myth of Converging Values (Penguin Canada, 2003), in the U.S., a vicious form of nihilism is the fastest growing cultural trend, and virtues like empathy, introspection, civic responsibility, and ecological consciousness are in rapid decline.

As the U.S. forces other nations to sacrifice their social safety nets, we can expect to see this cultural rot spread well beyond America's borders. Meanwhile, many people in developing nations are turning to terrorism to address their grievances, led by the example of Al Qaeda, descended from the radical Islamist groups recruited, organized, and trained by the CIA to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In a world as fragile as ours, the monsters we're creating may soon have the collective strength to ruin the most sheltered families, and condemn the global society to an inescapable wasteland.