The Russian intellectual, Vigotsky, made the point that a single word can mean more than a word: it can evoke a sentence, or a paragraph or a constellation of ideas.

He used, as an example, the word “exploitation.” The mere mention of the word in Stalinist Russia invoked images of factory workers toiling long hours for subsistence wages. Exploitation meant capitalist vampires sucking the blood from the working class. The mention of the word was fire starter on flame.

America has a word which serves the same function: socialism. And here I am not talking about the economic system, but rather the set of notions that the word itself arouses: Government should not invade our lives and make our decisions; you should work hard and be prudent and you won’t need the government; people should not think that the government owes them anything, and, there should be an adventurous capitalism with “no ceiling, no net.”

The fact that some folks work hard but can’t afford health coverage, or that people that do have “coverage” far too often end up in bankruptcy, notwithstanding, let’s assume for a moment that this argument has at least some merit. Hold that thought.

Interestingly, the folks most likely to champion such ideas are wealthy conservative capitalists. But, when some of them put leveraging on steroids, and through incompetence, negligence, criminality or a combination thereof, brought the economy to near collapse, the government, was their “daddy.”

They begged for money like men begging for water after days dehydrating in the Sonora Desert. Suddenly, they needed a “net.” “Save the economy! (and us). The system will collapse!

No talk of socialism then, was there? No “stand on your own two feet,” or “you must suffer the consequences of your acts,” or, “you’re poor because you want to be poor.”

Instead of the “every man for himself” mantra, we heard, “we all are in this together.” Even though “we” did not cause the debacle; “they” did.

They received enough help from the government to avert the crisis, at least for the time being. We don’t know how much because the Fed provided some of the aid and their workings are not open to public scrutiny. Without that help, the system “too big to fail,” would have failed.

When push comes to shove, the folks who espouse these ideas about government don’t even believe them. Nevertheless, they are effective in propagandizing the populace.

So, that is why we, unlike every other civilized country in the world, don’t have universal health care: because of the word “socialism.”

That is how ideology functions: We are preconditioned to allow rhetoric to mold our perceptions to make them work against our own best interests, and to see the world through the prism of the wealthy and powerful (which they themselves don’t adhere to when it becomes inconvenient to do so).

We have public water districts, public utilities, public education and public libraries. Why not public health care, privately administered: in other words, Medicare for all?

The system is in place, we just need a bigger umbrella.

Nelson Strasser lives in Lakeport, Calif.