136. ...intrinsically, kind and good.
(morning thinking)
I think that people are intrinsically, kind and good - we come with a preset for love - but society is inherently competitive; if I eat something you can't eat it, if I have something you can't have it, unless I choose to give it. Or you take it. Competition, unchecked leads to conflict.
There exists in us an innate selfishness based on a history of resource scarcity where calories were hard won through hard toil and dangerous effort. Berry foraging, maybe, notwithstanding.
I wonder if pick your own strawberry places are popular because they remind us, on a deep ancestral level, of the good times.
Competition itself is not inherently negative. Healthy rivalry can spur innovation, personal growth, and societal progress. Competition for food led to the invention of agriculture and, as a result, more people were more regularly fed.
Cooperation is the foil to competition.
And so, the challenge for us, as people, is to live happily in concert. Or to try to learn to live well together. We need to apply the love we embody as individuals to the way that we cohabit together as a society. Everybody lifting everybody up.
When we immerse ourselves in ideas of love and kindness it becomes difficult to think only of ourselves and it’s harder to see the bad in people.
We see the good in other people more readily when we remind ourselves to look.
This has been the goal of religious scriptures I think. They seem, across the board, to become tools for social control but I think in all of the cases I can follow the intention has been noble; they aimed to give us a way to make living with positive, loving, kindness more likely.
Buddhism tells us that the root of suffering is attachment - I think that's right anyway. I keep doing beginners Buddhism courses and I never get beyond beginner - but isn’t it possible to dig under attachment and arrive somewhere? Why do we become attached? Because we remember, at a cellular level, that before we were attached to this or that we were lacking in some way? Without this thing to which we have become attached we were in pain. We suffered. So is the root of suffering lack?
Can we find a base level of universal contentment beyond suffering? Satisfy everyone's survival needs, get Maslow's first couple of pyramid levels met. Have that all squared away and set about achieving self actualisation for all.
This seems increasingly possible.
According to the World Economic Forum “The huge majority of the world today is very poor. About 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day and 63% live on less than $10 per day.
It’s worth remembering that poor and poverty aren’t the same thing. According to GapMinder, “In 1980, roughly 40% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty, with less than $2 per day.” The amount of people living in extreme poverty today is less than 10%.
Maybe there are subtleties to poverty, variable interpretations of what counts as poor, but dignity is dignity.
In the WEF article linked above Max Roser of Oxford university suggests that we need economic growth to end world poverty.
Isn’t it possible that we already have all the wealth and technology we need to live well?
$267 billion could end global poverty for one year. Amazon’s annual profit is 85% of that. Everyone who works there is paid, all running costs are met. This is profit. What if all of our biggest companies chose to devote their gains to humanity’s betterment? What if all the basic needs of every person on the planet, just the food clothing and shelter stuff, were met?
Could we then focus on universal dignity?
Jeff Bezos couldn’t quite end world poverty on his own but there are 2640 billionaires on the planet with a massive 12 trillion dollar personal wealth. That’s almost 45 years worth of no poverty. Nearly half a century where no one goes hungry and that money’s sitting in bank accounts. Billionaire dragons have their scaled tails wrapped jealously around piles of wealth that could prevent anyone dying from hunger. They could give all that away, carry on doing as they’re doing and have all that money back in their banks in a decade or so. They’d still have their companies and assets, they’d still get paid.
Am I being wildly naive?
These people with their vast, unimaginable wealth, each own more televisions than they can count. They have more cars and fancier mountain bikes, perciser watches and shinier bangles than everyone you know, have ever know and will ever know, put together. They don’t want for any material thing.
Their needs are met a thousand times over.
Money corrupts. I know when I have money to burn it’s a giddying sensation. A spare £50 in my bank accountant takes an extreme effort of will to ignore. I can do good with spare money and I will donate to charity or buy a gift but I definitely indulge. I buy things I don’t need. The drug of consumer capitalism is potent.
When the money’s not there, in the absence of financial overspill, I think I’m more generous with my time and energy, more magnanimous with my love. When the cash tank is empty my kindness cup runneth over?
By 2026, there will be more than 87.5 MILLION millionaires on the planet. That’s more people than live in the UK. Imagine if everyone you met had a million spare pounds. Would we get together to end world hunger or would we have vanity plates on all our cars and spare houses for weekends away?
I’m not a better man with surplus cash and my surfeit bares no resemblance to that of a millionaire let alone a billionaire.
Does money corrupt our compassion? Does empathy diminish with increased affluence? Could we let our intrinsic kindness and love grow if we put less emphasis on personal wealth, financial prosperity and GDP? I think our current paradigm of money is holding us back.
If you understand economics and you can straighten this out for me please get in touch. I’d happily buy you a cup of tea or make you a bowl of soup.
Thanks for joining me. Your company is very much appreciated and I hope you’ll keep coming back.
Am I being wildly naive? What might better look like?
Maybe you know an economist or financial philosopher of some sort. Could they clean up my morning thinking?