THE PECKING ORDER LIFE REVEALED
In more detail, here's why films like "Avatar" are damaging to the human species. I think all of us must recognize that rooted in our evolutionary adaptions is a "pecking order". We can't help but navigate the world with an underlying judgment structure that places us in value-based human relationships within our cultures. Every time we make a judgment (based on feelings), we are asserting our place in the pecking order. It's a key survival tool. We rationalize our individual pecking orders when we make judgments about others that we put into words. Those we feel negatives about are below us and those we like are equal to or above us. At the level of far above us are our heroes. Of course, we also loathe those we fear and who are in a transcendent place in our value systems. You can see this at work when the mob enjoys the downfall of their "favorite" movie star or the disappointment we feel when one of our heroes in the culture wars falls from society's grace.
We can see our places in the pecking order by taking a careful look at those we place above us and those we place below us and those we judge as equals (i.e. those we are most ourselves with). Even though we may not be consciously arranging our relationships on these value levels, our brains automatically do it. That's the pecking order at work. It's the monkey in us.
My contention about almost all Hollywood films is that they automatically try to trigger our "pecking order" functions in order to trigger us to shell out good dollars. They trigger the "good guy, bad guy" structures in our brains. Every time we shell out dollars to these men who are plying our "pecking order brains" for our bucks, we are allowing our nervous systems to be exercised and our pecking order brain functions are strengthened and reinforced almost automatically. You can see this revealed in almost any conversation about films and/or drama. People automatically like or dislike characters and usually talk about films with this in mind. When you put evil versus good into these films, you begin to push pecking orders into religious realms. I think religious persons are really stuck in a royal pecking order—witness their heavenly and/or religious hierarchies—lords, kings and princes all!
The directors are directing not only the actors but our emotions to make us feel identity with characters in the films and to keep us coming back. This is why people don't like downer films which aren't fun to watch because they trigger emotions and consequent thoughts which are unpleasant. People don't like to watch their REAL SELVES up there on the big screen. They don't want to learn from film and drama. They don't want to think about unpleasant realities. Most people go to films to escape. Most people are always in an escape mode. Anytime I hear someone tell me that they go to movies to escape, I usually lose interest in them because they don't like dealing with reality at any other time in their lives. Okay, I have a pecking order too.
I still recall the first time I told myself that I ought to be rooting for the native Americans in John Wayne movies. I wasn't a kid by any means. It was a great leap forward in one way, but, as my identity with the downtrodden increased so also did my alcoholism, and soon my identifying with the underdog led me to also become an underdog and a loser. The more I hated those "above" me in the pecking order, the lower I fell in the ranks of the pecking order. The more I resolved not to compete with the bastards, the more I was unable to compete. I sank pretty low before the friends of Bill W. helped me stop using the depressant alcohol as a treatment for my depression. By age 31 or 32, I was so low that I spontaneously crashed my car one cold Winter's eve by speeding into a turn I knew I could not negotiate at speed. By the time I climbed out of the bottom of the pecking order, a good part of my earning life was over so my retirement is not in the greatest of financial straits, but I'm content because the "demons" are gone from my life. Like that "demon" metaphor? The religious among us also like to use that term.
Two recent films that demonstrate a way to make films that escape the "pecking order" are Rachel Getting Married and The Last Station. Films that worked against the pecking order in the past were Fellini's 8 1/2 or Juliet of the Spirits. In Fellini films, the characters are always at battle with the pecking orders in their heads, the distorted views of reality they carry around in their imaginations. It's wonderful and enlightening to come to in a Fellini film. Another great film which defies the pecking order is Sante Sangre. A serial killer is portrayed sympathetically, and I came across that film just when Silence of the Lambs was making a killing by portraying a serial killer in an almost evil light. Also, the last scene in The Truman Show was a vital metaphor. When Truman stepped through the containing wall into the real world, he was leaving the god-dominated, false world and entering the real world. That was my emotional response to that film. Scorsese's Taxi Driver approached the "pecking order" from another satirical angle. By making an insane and violent scene become the making of a hero, Scorcese revealed the whole fake pecking order nightmare we live in, surrounded by people whose "pecking order" responses are nearly automatic and not reflective.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
MORE DEBATE ABOUT FREE WILL
Ronhorgan wrote: Thus my problem with the determinist position is that it may be demotivating.
Ronhorgan,
My distant computer friend is only one of many reasons that I believe my behavior is determined by factors beyond my control.
The argument that determinism is "demotivating" cannot be a legitimate reason to disregard the evidence for our determinant situation. I note a tendency to bring morality into this particular discussion quite a lot. People cite the lack of moral accountability that seems to accompany a materialistic view of human behavior. People note that we won't be able to hold people accountable for their behavior if we come to the conclusion that human decisions are determined by factors not in their control. But the fear of a particular scientific conclusion is not itself a scientific fact that ought to keep us from arriving at the truth. We would all be Bible literalists if we failed to accept the truth because of irrational fears.
I have to note that we long ago decided that some people are not in control of their behavior when we allow insanity as a plea in trial cases, but insanity, itself, is a label that we put on behavior that does not fit into the normal range of human behavior. In short, it's asocial behavior that our fear of death causes us to angrily respond to. For a time, I believe, in some countries, the rage of a jealous husband was an allowable defense for murder of a rival. If we now realize that such a view of jealousy is unacceptable, it is because slowly a new social norm has arisen into human consciousness, but that new norm is a group phenomena that is evolving as we speak, one brain at a time. We also do not, in America, allow a Muslim father to kill his daughter for asserting her right to fit into American culture. We also are beginning to reign in a parent's religious right to kill his children through neglect of their health needs. As to our overall debate about the death penalty, we seem, because we can debate the issue, to believe that we have free will, but if each of us were honest about our own individual decisions about the death penalty, we would see that individually, our decision were emotional decisions over which we had no control. For myself, my brain is able to consider that—maybe—we ought not to allow the death penalty, but my emotions have not come to that conclusion at all. All arguments against the death penalty fall on my deaf emotional ears so I have made no decision about that particular reality external to my own. Just don't ask me to be the executioner, then, I fear, I would be immobilized by emotional considerations. Future human cultural decisions, if they are basically self-regarding, will naturally lead the human species to the best survival strategies though it will be one individual at a time.
Let me return to another fact that causes me to believe that we are not in control of our own behavior—the moment to moment functioning of the human brain. At any one moment the brain is being bombarded by information arriving from its sensory apparatuses. All of this information is aiming to arrive into our consciousness, all at the same time. Through chemical reactions beyond our control, chains of synapses are firing or being shut down by processes beyond my control. Which impulse from which sensory apparatus that arrives into our consciousnesses is completely out of our control. We hear a sound (a loud crack or a bee buzz) and we instinctively duck and cover. All evidence shows that we commence to duck before we are conscious that we will duck. In short, action precedes awareness.
As to bees, why do we so instinctively duck? It's because those that didn't duck in the evolutionary past and for whom a bee sting was toxic are no longer among us. We now have bee sting kits, et cetera for those who are allergic to bee stings. Same with peanut butter. We have new cultural phenomena arising based on past experience which we are now conscious of, but these are group phenomena. In the individual brain, the duck or don't duck remains an instinct.
My conclusion is that if I cannot control any of the synapses which are firing in my brain and, thus, cannot control which sensory data reaches my consciousness, I cannot be said to be in control of my behavior. Behavior is going on under the radar of my consciousness constantly which, when I become aware of it, I am proud or ashamed of (to name but two possible emotional reactions). Since emotions are the adaptations that regulate human behavior (according to evolutionary psychologists) and emotional reactions are also beyond my control, I conclude here, too, that I am not a free agent. I cannot even choose which thoughts I will think. I conclude we are all day dreamers every moment of our lives while our biological frameworks go about functioning of their own volitions.
PS: I must add here that some of us are able to refrain from hitting the human who is irritating us while others among us can't control that hit reaction. And don't we pride ourselves on our restraint in our afterthoughts? Yet, if most of us were honest with ourselves, we'd see that we were afraid to strike out at our antagonist because we feared the result of that action more than the emotional resolution that hitting our antagonist would bring to our limbic systems. It's fear that keeps us in check, and if we're honest, we wouldn't be so proud of what we can't control.
By the way, an additional consideration here, is that some discussions of my fear-based view of human behavior might label me as conservative rather than liberal. Steven Pinker concludes in his book, The Blank Slate, that the conservative view of human behavior is probably more attuned with evolutionary psychology's findings than the liberal view is. Liberals are hopefully naive while conservatives are pessimistically inhibited. Wouldn't that knowledge of his alignment to evolutionary psychology drive a religious conservative nuts?
Ronhorgan wrote: Thus my problem with the determinist position is that it may be demotivating.
Ronhorgan,
My distant computer friend is only one of many reasons that I believe my behavior is determined by factors beyond my control.
The argument that determinism is "demotivating" cannot be a legitimate reason to disregard the evidence for our determinant situation. I note a tendency to bring morality into this particular discussion quite a lot. People cite the lack of moral accountability that seems to accompany a materialistic view of human behavior. People note that we won't be able to hold people accountable for their behavior if we come to the conclusion that human decisions are determined by factors not in their control. But the fear of a particular scientific conclusion is not itself a scientific fact that ought to keep us from arriving at the truth. We would all be Bible literalists if we failed to accept the truth because of irrational fears.
I have to note that we long ago decided that some people are not in control of their behavior when we allow insanity as a plea in trial cases, but insanity, itself, is a label that we put on behavior that does not fit into the normal range of human behavior. In short, it's asocial behavior that our fear of death causes us to angrily respond to. For a time, I believe, in some countries, the rage of a jealous husband was an allowable defense for murder of a rival. If we now realize that such a view of jealousy is unacceptable, it is because slowly a new social norm has arisen into human consciousness, but that new norm is a group phenomena that is evolving as we speak, one brain at a time. We also do not, in America, allow a Muslim father to kill his daughter for asserting her right to fit into American culture. We also are beginning to reign in a parent's religious right to kill his children through neglect of their health needs. As to our overall debate about the death penalty, we seem, because we can debate the issue, to believe that we have free will, but if each of us were honest about our own individual decisions about the death penalty, we would see that individually, our decision were emotional decisions over which we had no control. For myself, my brain is able to consider that—maybe—we ought not to allow the death penalty, but my emotions have not come to that conclusion at all. All arguments against the death penalty fall on my deaf emotional ears so I have made no decision about that particular reality external to my own. Just don't ask me to be the executioner, then, I fear, I would be immobilized by emotional considerations. Future human cultural decisions, if they are basically self-regarding, will naturally lead the human species to the best survival strategies though it will be one individual at a time.
Let me return to another fact that causes me to believe that we are not in control of our own behavior—the moment to moment functioning of the human brain. At any one moment the brain is being bombarded by information arriving from its sensory apparatuses. All of this information is aiming to arrive into our consciousness, all at the same time. Through chemical reactions beyond our control, chains of synapses are firing or being shut down by processes beyond my control. Which impulse from which sensory apparatus that arrives into our consciousnesses is completely out of our control. We hear a sound (a loud crack or a bee buzz) and we instinctively duck and cover. All evidence shows that we commence to duck before we are conscious that we will duck. In short, action precedes awareness.
As to bees, why do we so instinctively duck? It's because those that didn't duck in the evolutionary past and for whom a bee sting was toxic are no longer among us. We now have bee sting kits, et cetera for those who are allergic to bee stings. Same with peanut butter. We have new cultural phenomena arising based on past experience which we are now conscious of, but these are group phenomena. In the individual brain, the duck or don't duck remains an instinct.
My conclusion is that if I cannot control any of the synapses which are firing in my brain and, thus, cannot control which sensory data reaches my consciousness, I cannot be said to be in control of my behavior. Behavior is going on under the radar of my consciousness constantly which, when I become aware of it, I am proud or ashamed of (to name but two possible emotional reactions). Since emotions are the adaptations that regulate human behavior (according to evolutionary psychologists) and emotional reactions are also beyond my control, I conclude here, too, that I am not a free agent. I cannot even choose which thoughts I will think. I conclude we are all day dreamers every moment of our lives while our biological frameworks go about functioning of their own volitions.
PS: I must add here that some of us are able to refrain from hitting the human who is irritating us while others among us can't control that hit reaction. And don't we pride ourselves on our restraint in our afterthoughts? Yet, if most of us were honest with ourselves, we'd see that we were afraid to strike out at our antagonist because we feared the result of that action more than the emotional resolution that hitting our antagonist would bring to our limbic systems. It's fear that keeps us in check, and if we're honest, we wouldn't be so proud of what we can't control.
By the way, an additional consideration here, is that some discussions of my fear-based view of human behavior might label me as conservative rather than liberal. Steven Pinker concludes in his book, The Blank Slate, that the conservative view of human behavior is probably more attuned with evolutionary psychology's findings than the liberal view is. Liberals are hopefully naive while conservatives are pessimistically inhibited. Wouldn't that knowledge of his alignment to evolutionary psychology drive a religious conservative nuts?
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
MORE ON DETERMINISM
The following is a response I entered on the Pantheism website in response to Ronhorgan's comment:
Ronhorgan said: The problem with the hot potato is that free will is both true and false. As a young man I could not escape the absolute truth that I was wholly predetermined; a very cheerless place to live.
My response was: I had the opposite experience. The exact moment that I decided in late-middle life that I was a robot, I was filled with an immediate sense of elation, and a paradoxical thought lept into my mind, I have never felt so free. As a youth I tried to believe in a sort of Freudian determinism, but all his explanations for human behavior (also Jung's explanations) seemed endlessly ambiguous and unsatisfying answers to what human consciousness labels cruelty and deceit. Actually no human act is cruel or deceitful; they are emotional labels consciousness, instructed by emotion, applies to the human brain doing its thing. A greater consciousness, an emotionless deterministic robot, observing from afar, would only see actions and not the emotions. It would be able to see how certain actions lead to certain results. It would even be able to quantify the results of the actions it observes. The funny thing is that good science is that distant and robotic observer. And evolutionary psychology is now putting human behavior under the microscope and it can quantify human behavior. For example, it reveals that the degree of kinship has a statistical correlation to the degree of favoritism that one human shows to another. Stuff like that.
When I began to read the works of evolutionary psychologists, every problem I had understanding human history disappeared. My understanding was complete, and I would never have to moan again, "Why O why, Lord?" The Lord is in there because consciousness brought with it dualism. As soon as the brain's auditory functions became complex enough to be multi-layered and recursive, there appeared in nature the brain speaking to itself and the brain directing the body's movements. The brain thinks and the brain that thinks (i.e. overhears its auditory bits rumbling along) has assigned God (the unknown and a concomitant conscious moral system) as an explanation for why the body is doing what it does. In a way, saying that Adam and Eve ate the apple is as good as any explanation for why one human animal harms another human animal as any other. The cause of the harm is buried in the purely physical body and is determined by electro/chemical activities which defy conscious control. Thus the label evil arises from a fairy tale.
Memories (synaptic memories of actions) are stored with emotions and emotions are also the trigger mechanisms for directing human behavior. Thus any act of the body has a memory in the synaptic patterns which are connected to the emotional captain of the ship. The emotional captain of the ship is separate from the rationalizing function of the brain which tries to explain and excuse every action that it has no control over except to rationalize and explain its behavior to itself and to its fellow chimps in the human network. Thinking is as deterministic as action is. Emotions, memories and thoughts swirl around each other, continuously stimulated by input from the environment. A certain emotion will stimulate a certain memory and vice versa.
An input from the environment will trigger an emotion which raises up memories of an action and an impulse to do that action, but that impulse to action (or thought) is then modulated by other emotions labeled as shame or guilt which are attached to other memories of past actions and events and results. Eventually, through that mixture of memory and their attached emotions an action is triggered by whichever chemical mixture wins the competition to act (or not act). From an array of potential actions one action has the chemical strength to cause the action to happen. The strength of an action is determined by the emotional (chemical) power that releases the action. Thus one man in a bar fight breaks a bottle and drives the shards of that bottle into his antagonist's face while another never goes beyond using his fists. His drive (emotional power) to do harm by his actions is modulated by other emotions (chemical determinants) that restrain his acts. The resolutions of his entire brain with all its emotions and memories just can't generate the emotional/chemical response that makes for a killing.
As usual, I wrote far more than I intended, but every avenue down which I follow determinism is endlessly fascinating. Writing about paradoxical stuff like conscious control as opposed to determinism constantly tantalizes me and causes words to flow.
The following is a response I entered on the Pantheism website in response to Ronhorgan's comment:
Ronhorgan said: The problem with the hot potato is that free will is both true and false. As a young man I could not escape the absolute truth that I was wholly predetermined; a very cheerless place to live.
My response was: I had the opposite experience. The exact moment that I decided in late-middle life that I was a robot, I was filled with an immediate sense of elation, and a paradoxical thought lept into my mind, I have never felt so free. As a youth I tried to believe in a sort of Freudian determinism, but all his explanations for human behavior (also Jung's explanations) seemed endlessly ambiguous and unsatisfying answers to what human consciousness labels cruelty and deceit. Actually no human act is cruel or deceitful; they are emotional labels consciousness, instructed by emotion, applies to the human brain doing its thing. A greater consciousness, an emotionless deterministic robot, observing from afar, would only see actions and not the emotions. It would be able to see how certain actions lead to certain results. It would even be able to quantify the results of the actions it observes. The funny thing is that good science is that distant and robotic observer. And evolutionary psychology is now putting human behavior under the microscope and it can quantify human behavior. For example, it reveals that the degree of kinship has a statistical correlation to the degree of favoritism that one human shows to another. Stuff like that.
When I began to read the works of evolutionary psychologists, every problem I had understanding human history disappeared. My understanding was complete, and I would never have to moan again, "Why O why, Lord?" The Lord is in there because consciousness brought with it dualism. As soon as the brain's auditory functions became complex enough to be multi-layered and recursive, there appeared in nature the brain speaking to itself and the brain directing the body's movements. The brain thinks and the brain that thinks (i.e. overhears its auditory bits rumbling along) has assigned God (the unknown and a concomitant conscious moral system) as an explanation for why the body is doing what it does. In a way, saying that Adam and Eve ate the apple is as good as any explanation for why one human animal harms another human animal as any other. The cause of the harm is buried in the purely physical body and is determined by electro/chemical activities which defy conscious control. Thus the label evil arises from a fairy tale.
Memories (synaptic memories of actions) are stored with emotions and emotions are also the trigger mechanisms for directing human behavior. Thus any act of the body has a memory in the synaptic patterns which are connected to the emotional captain of the ship. The emotional captain of the ship is separate from the rationalizing function of the brain which tries to explain and excuse every action that it has no control over except to rationalize and explain its behavior to itself and to its fellow chimps in the human network. Thinking is as deterministic as action is. Emotions, memories and thoughts swirl around each other, continuously stimulated by input from the environment. A certain emotion will stimulate a certain memory and vice versa.
An input from the environment will trigger an emotion which raises up memories of an action and an impulse to do that action, but that impulse to action (or thought) is then modulated by other emotions labeled as shame or guilt which are attached to other memories of past actions and events and results. Eventually, through that mixture of memory and their attached emotions an action is triggered by whichever chemical mixture wins the competition to act (or not act). From an array of potential actions one action has the chemical strength to cause the action to happen. The strength of an action is determined by the emotional (chemical) power that releases the action. Thus one man in a bar fight breaks a bottle and drives the shards of that bottle into his antagonist's face while another never goes beyond using his fists. His drive (emotional power) to do harm by his actions is modulated by other emotions (chemical determinants) that restrain his acts. The resolutions of his entire brain with all its emotions and memories just can't generate the emotional/chemical response that makes for a killing.
As usual, I wrote far more than I intended, but every avenue down which I follow determinism is endlessly fascinating. Writing about paradoxical stuff like conscious control as opposed to determinism constantly tantalizes me and causes words to flow.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
MORE BATTLING IN THE COLUMBIAN, VANCOUVER, WA
“There is an old saying that: ‘Politics is like a dysfunctional marriage--every fight is really about something else...’ This applies to the travel to Spain by Michelle et al, the Mosque Cultural Center in Manhattan, along with the old standby ‘wedge issues’ like ‘Guns, God and Gays’.”
“There is an old saying that: ‘Politics is like a dysfunctional marriage--every fight is really about something else...’ This applies to the travel to Spain by Michelle et al, the Mosque Cultural Center in Manhattan, along with the old standby ‘wedge issues’ like ‘Guns, God and Gays’.”
What party has been against minimum wage increases, the 40 hour week, sick leave, paid vacations, OSHA, unions, Labor and Industry protections, social security, equal pay for women, mine safety, subsidizing public transport and unemployment insurance? What party since 1930 has labeled as Socialism every benefit aimed toward the welfare of the average wage earner? On its other face, what party since 1980 has backed every change that has allowed the wealthiest Americans to become so wealthy it’s like the 1920s again when 85% of American wealth was in the hands of 15% of the American populace? What party’s policies have shrunk the income of the middle class and created the current huge gap between America’s richest and America’s poorest while seeing the wealthiest earn obscene bonuses that they then protect with lowered taxes and minimal inheritance taxes? What party has helped create a class of citizen whose inherited power, wealth and prestige equals the sort of inherited power and privilege that our founding fathers found disgusting in Great Britain?
If you’re a wage worker and you vote for the Republican/Tea Party, you will have betrayed your class.
The sad thing is that I like Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is actually a woman of the people, but, like her Southern brethren, she is as uninformed as a boulder at the bottom of the Salton Sea, dumb as a post, blind as a mole.
Monday, August 09, 2010
DOWN WITH THE BURKHA AND VEIL!
To spread freedom and democracy as widely as possible, America will need to become extremely feminist in its leanings; the way toward a truly worldwide celebration of liberty leads through the veiled and burkha-clad women of the world. It begins at home in America with making certain that the government loses all control over the feminine reproductive system. A woman's abortion rights are inalienable civil rights.
When we've proven that we really believe that a person (a woman) has complete control over their own bodies, then who knows what ideas might occur to a woman living behind an imposed veil or within the voluminous and smothering burkha. Those crazy, suppressed and fearful Moslem men sense that their greatest fear of American freedom is in how we treat our women as valuable and free people. That's what Islam fears in America, and, to tell the truth, what, also, fundamentalist Christians also fear in their own country—women who can decide for themselves how to deal with their own sexuality.
To spread freedom and democracy as widely as possible, America will need to become extremely feminist in its leanings; the way toward a truly worldwide celebration of liberty leads through the veiled and burkha-clad women of the world. It begins at home in America with making certain that the government loses all control over the feminine reproductive system. A woman's abortion rights are inalienable civil rights.
When we've proven that we really believe that a person (a woman) has complete control over their own bodies, then who knows what ideas might occur to a woman living behind an imposed veil or within the voluminous and smothering burkha. Those crazy, suppressed and fearful Moslem men sense that their greatest fear of American freedom is in how we treat our women as valuable and free people. That's what Islam fears in America, and, to tell the truth, what, also, fundamentalist Christians also fear in their own country—women who can decide for themselves how to deal with their own sexuality.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
POLITICS AS USUAL
DeeLittle left a comment on your wall:
RE YOUR REPLY:
before the gvt decided to step in, our country took care of the poor. right here in vancouver, on 78th where there's a community garden...that used to be the 'poor farm' where people who couldn't support themselves, lived & farmed there. the ymca/ywca, catholic missions, people give
ing their neighbors food and helping them get back on their feet....
this country's people help those who cannot help themselves.
the problem isn't 'can't help', the problem is 'won't help' themselves.
do you believe the country owes these people? or is it the duty of their families?
Dear DeeLittle,
Your reply came through garbled. I respect that you cared to reply also and I hear your concerns.
As a young man I met many men of the Depression Era working in machine shops with me. Two informed me that they were married but did not live with their wives anymore. In order to qualify, during the Depression, for welfare, a woman needed to show that she had no husband present in the house. These two men both had departed their homes and hoboed around the nation taking whatever work was available so that their families could eat. By the time the Depression was over, their marriages were in tatters. They’d grown apart. One of these men was an alcoholic by the time I met him. The other was just an old man batching it and still getting by. So the past is not necessarily a model for the present.
Also private charity which you seem to favor has at least two drawbacks. When charity is connected with religious organizations, the charity often comes with proselytizing. Proselytizing to broken people takes unfair advantage of those wounded people. Second, private charity has never, in the history of mankind, been able to meet the real needs of those who for one reason or another have not effectively competed with their fellow humans in the free market system.
As to families taking up the burden: I think you’ll find that the reason many people are failing to compete is the result of them not having substantial family resources or support. To ask families to care for people that they have already not supported with emotional or financial resources will not meet the demand. The working poor rarely have the resources to get their children into educational levels sufficient for them to compete with the children of the rich whose education is paid for by their parents. The rich, though they sometimes also fail, always get a boost up that their poorer neighbors do not get.
Finally, the real issue is whether or not free market capitalism needs poverty for it to exist. Can the free market provide enough jobs with adequate pay so that workers can earn enough to take care of their families, educate them, meet their health needs and retire without poverty? I see no place in the world, past or present, where free markets supply all the jobs necessary to creating such a plentiful nation. So poverty seems to be a natural result of free market economies. Even though communism is a failed experiment, it was obvious that the financial gap between the rich and the poor there, at the end of the Soviet experiment, was not as great as it is in America so a planned economy also has at least that strength.
But here’s the bottom line of my morality. If capitalism will always create a class of citizen who is in poverty, isn’t it the responsibility of those who are most benefiting from the capitalistic system to make sure that they share some of their wealth with those who must be at the bottom in order for the whole system to operate efficiently?
The conservative argument always seems to me to adhere to the Social Darwinian belief that those who can’t compete must sink into the mire and live there unredeemed and unaided. I agree that life is not and never has been fair, but as a citizen, I’m willing to tax myself in order to create a semblance of humanity within the free market system. So many of the rich (lucky to be born into wealth and into good genes and with reasonable intelligence) who benefit from free market economies seem to think that the world owes them this living and that they have no responsibility to return anything to the system that was so rigged as to make them rich while it impoverishes the other.
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