You might scratch your head and wonder why belief and believing could be considered to be a problem where government is concerned. Here's why:

Much of what constitutes belief, lacking support of honestly obtained knowledge, tends to be founded -- variously -- on emotional need, resentment, anger unwarranted certitude and, as often as not, on theological dogma.

A significant tenet of the belief system held by a rising political dispensation can best be summed up in the words once uttered by the late Margaret Thatcher to the effect that there is no such thing as society, just individual persons. Thatcher meant in effect that it was not government's job to care for the poor (who should only pull themselves up by their own bootstraps), that government should not attempt to regulate much of anything, that government should burn incense to the free market no matter what.

A growing majority of the relatively few people who will now effectively run this country are Thatcherites and Reaganites, the central principle of whose theology is that the government which governs best governs least. In that analysis, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare are offensive because their basis in interdependence suggests socialism.

Such is the gospel of that emergent political reality. It draws raw energy from tea party types and their billionaire cohorts who dream of low-to-no taxes and the dismantlement of government programs now funded by tax dollars -- programs that protect the poor and disadvantaged from sliding into destitution. But, if Thatcher was right, neither poverty nor destitution is the government's problem.

However, we have the model of interdependence given to us by nature -- or, if you insist, "Nature's God," as the Declaration of Independence says.

On a perfect autumn afternoon -- the perennial desideratum of anyone fortunate enough to live in the nation's temperate zone -- I saw how nature works as I sat in solemn silence with one of my sons in a deer blind. The last insects of summer buzzed uncertainly around us and the birds came and went as the sun began its descent into the west. Eventually a doe led her two fawns out of the thicket into the meadow below us. The fawns grazed as the doe stood alertly nearby -- a mother making sure her youngsters found nourishment and were protected as they fed.

Those whose beliefs deny the existence of society and the interdependence of its people must be seen in opposition to the example nature has set before us. What my son and I saw on that glorious afternoon may be how things are supposed to work -- for deer and human beings.

How lovely it would be to trade belief and believing for experience and reason. That was the great contribution of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who birthed an America that, like the autumnal doe, takes care of its young, its weak and those however disadvantaged through no fault of their own.

It was not a hardcore belief system that informed Roosevelt. It was experience. Experience is a far better guide than belief. The former is rooted in what eye can see, ear can hear and heart can feel. The latter is rooted in abstraction and, as often as not, self-serving.

Roosevelt was no ideologue. As he said in his second inaugural: "I have seen one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." In trying to right those manifest wrongs, he came under fire for the unorthodox nature of his methods and methodology. He responded to his critics thus: "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another." Never mind hardcore ideology. Do whatever works.

No one who peers into the abyss of economic and social disadvantage dares say that the beliefs of those who will soon be in charge would work, save as ways of enriching the already affluent while depriving the elderly, the poor and the underrepresented of what they need to be able to live with some semblance of security, never mind dignity.

The deer get it. Why don't we?