A summary of Food for Thought up to now

My previous entries have fallen into the following four categories:

1.     Caveats

2.     Economies and Government

3.     Capitalism and democracy

4.     The modern world blessing or curse

Caveats

I started on a cautionary note about what we know and why we accept what we know.  Often what we profess to be true we believe to be true because “they” said it.  In addition and probably more importantly we believe certain things because of our emotional predisposition.

The take home is to be humble (as he dishes out platitudes) about what we think we know and why we are so willing to accept those “facts”. As an example of this, in a recent book discussion, I, being a hopeless romantic, came to a very optimistic view of the prospects of the protagonist at the end of the book. Another reader who is well known to be a hopeless, heartless cynic came to a very different conclusion.  My first reaction was to dismiss that person’s view because of course it was distorted. However, after further consideration of that point of view and realizing my own propensities, I changed my view to one that was much more guarded.  By taking a minute to consider the point from a different predisposition I got a fuller understanding of the reading.

Economies and government

Economies start when people barter and trade. As soon as that happens they have make/buy decisions. As economies mature people decide to buy much more than they decide to make.

Governments start as a means of protecting property.  Property is life liberty and physical possessions. When people form governments they trade freedom to (do as they please with their life liberty and physical possessions) for freedom from threats to their life liberty and physical possessions by others.

At first those “others” are people in other groups but as groups get bigger they need protection for their life liberty and physical possessions from people within the group. As a result laws, standards, and regulations are promulgated to protect property from others in the group.

The take home is that as labor divides and each person becomes more specialized, we overwhelmingly make buy decisions over make decisions.  As the system fosters this specialization we resort to a massive regulatory system to give us freedom from having to decide if the transactions we are making are fair – from the weight of a loaf of bread to the safety of the toaster we use. Subjecting ourselves to (and paying for) the laws, standards, and regulations of government we liberate ourselves to use our life liberty and physical possessions as we see fit within those constraints.

Capitalism and democracy

The economy is the game we all play and government makes the rules by which we play. At the current moment of history capitalism is the name of our game and democracy is the structure of the government that does the rule making. Most public policy debates revolve around how strictly should government call the game. Since its democracy, we all have a say in who gets to decide and enforce the rules. 

The take home here first is capitalism is not the problem.  Capitalism is descriptive of how people respond to property as soon as they start to barter and trade. Capitalism is never unbridled because it always operates within the constraints of government.

Problems arise when certain players either make the rules or can pay people to make the rules to favor them. Hereditary governments and communism are both inherently flawed in this respect because the rule makers are always in a position to make rules that favor themselves.  Democracy should theoretically be able to solve that problem because at least theoretically we all ought to have equal opportunity to make the rules or influence the selection of the people who will be making the rules for us.  Unfortunately, as it is practiced in the United States, the process is flawed because the more money you have the more you can pay to have the game called in your favor.

The modern world blessing or curse

In the last 250 years there has been an exponential spread and growth in the material wealth of mankind with most of this coming since the last half of the 20^th century.  This is clearly the result of capitalism providing markets for new technologies powered almost exclusively by fossil fuels.  This has created unprecedented wealth for unprecedented portions of the world’s population. In addition, because we no longer have to earn our bread by the sweat of another man’s brow or in most cases by anyone’s sweat, slavery and male gender domination are no longer normative behavior as they have been for most of human history.

For all the prosperity and refinements civilization has to offer, we feel something is oddly amiss.  In the time before history when we lived as hunter/gatherers we were more connected to our clan and to nature although we were much more likely to be at war with the clan or tribe that lived nearby.  We had a sense of agency that everything we did made a difference and the differences mattered because they were often the difference between life and death.  It has been suggested that since this is the way we had lived for most of mankind’s existence, perhaps the epidemic of depression, suicide, drug addiction, and child abuse we find ourselves in today is because we have not evolved as quickly as our cultural patterns have changed.

For most of human history man evolved while living on the brink.  Surviving on the brink gives man a sense of meaning even today.  According to Victor Frankl the search for meaning is man’s principle driving instinct.  And where did Dr. Frankl come to this revelation; living on the brink in Hitler’s concentration camps for more than four years.

“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Reliance

The take home is that we have spent the last ten millennia moving away from the brink and we have in the last 2 centuries been wildly successful at it and we are not going back in large numbers, voluntarily, any time soon.  If for no other reason moving from the brink promotes survival with which we have also been wildly successful. That said meaning is important if not essential to life and finding it in the midst of our prosperity can be difficult and may explain some of the bizarre choices we see people in civilized society making.