12th
An Essay of Four Parts: How I Would Run the World
One of the most insightful observations I have received regarding my personality was this: “Edwin, if you ever do become ruler of the world, the rich and the poor will be fine. It’s the middle class that will suffer.” I think this explains much of my behavior, from dating mistakes to choice of literature. What separates the middle class from everyone else is their uniform failings. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
1. Education and Free Will
The poor can be divided into two classes. The first are the ones opportunity left behind. I’m a believer that free will is limited by knowledge: our choice of behavior is constrained by what we think to be possible. Research in human development mirrors this statement, as does our legal system: while it sets the age of majority relatively arbitrarily, it still sets one.
The rationale behind our laws is that we are incapable of making informed decisions for ourselves before a certain age. The median for this certain age happens to be 18 in America. In other cultures, it has ranged from as young as 9 to as old as 25. In all cases, it is the parents’ responsibility to ensure that children are provided with an adequate level of experience and reasoning capabilities to choose their own path through life.
Upbringing is a delicate topic. Political scientists and parents both struggle with the notion that generationally, wealth does not change hands readily. Money tends to concentrate in the upper 5% and fails to trickle down. With few notable exceptions, the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. Is this a failing of genetics or environment? When one witnesses the cycle of drug use and incrimination in inner cities, one is tempted to say environment and thus becomes a liberal. When one witnesses the sudden rise of Italian small businesses and the nouveau riche of the 20s, one is tempted to say genetics and thus becomes a conservative.
The core question becomes: at what point do we have enough individual responsibility to accept the burden of free will? Of course there is no right answer, but the legal system still depends on a best answer. From what I have observed working in soup kitchens and inner-city mentoring programs, I would venture that it is when we are strong enough that we do not resign ourselves to fate.
It is a curious conundrum. In accepting free will — responsibility for our actions — we burden ourselves with the consequences of our own poor choices. And in denying it, we free ourselves from responsibility. Why would anyone willingly choose to be free?
And yet, it is a theme I see again and again. In my four years of working with and supervising a small New Hampshire soup kitchen, I grew very close to the regulars. They had very little in common except for their own particular brand of resignation. Life was life, they reasoned, and the stresses of everyday life were something to be endured, not challenged.
This dichotomy was especially apparent when placed in juxtaposition to my high school, a mere half-mile away. There, the sons and daughters of the privileged were taught — indoctrinated, even — that the world was in their grasp, if they would only stretch out and reach for it.
Thus I ran the soup kitchen and they came. Freedom is not optional: after a certain level, it is the inevitable choice — because with its barbs of responsibility comes the intoxicating scent of opportunity.
2. Physical Disability and Psychological Neuroses
The second major bastion of the poor consists of those who, through some combination of bad luck or misgiven circumstance, are saddled with physical disability or mental neuroses. The obdurate nature of the physical preordains sympathy. But the psychological is more interesting; its crushing nature is counterbalanced by the high-functioning of many medicated individuals.
Out of some sense of unsophisticated wonderment towards the tragic, at one point I dated, in rapid succession, a series of depressed, schizoid, bipolar or otherwise afflicted individuals. My first lesson was that it was a mistake: in spite of whatever lingering curiosity I possess, romance does not seem to be the correct vehicle for enabling objective empirical observation. (Surprisingly, it is for most of the cases of the more mundane.)
My second lesson is more nuanced and harder for me to admit. Inevitably, I would try to fix her. That was, after all, the raison d’etre of the relationship in the first place. It is hard for me to admit because it reveals an incredibly high level of naivety, and more significantly, because it reveals what I now realize as an incredibly manipulative personality.
What ended this streak of destructive behavior was my realization that I no longer held any affection towards these girls — only contempt. That scared me because my initial impetus was to help — and because I was genuinely attracted; the neurotic have far more interesting views of the world than the well-adjusted. And I am repelled by the mundane.
Even in the most desperate plea of the depressive — “why?” or “Why me?” — lie the seeds of self-examination, a process that is usually fruitful. The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed. That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it.
Sometimes you see more in the scattered memories of a time than when you were actually there. At the time, it seemed like a noble undertaking. What these girls were missing, I reasoned, was a grip on reality: some dose of rational thinking. They are simply letting their emotions run wild.
I can pinpoint where this perspective comes from. Over time, I have learned that my personal experience of emotions is vastly different from much of the world’s. For me, emotion is something to be controlled — filtered through the rational part of the brain. In experiencing an emotion, the first question I ask is whether it makes sense to be experiencing the emotion — and closely following, whether experiencing the emotion will help my life in a practical manner.
As I grow older, I gain better tools through which to control my emotions: better metrics to measure their impact, more experiences to predict their outcomes. So I assumed that all they needed was to be taught better tools and then they would be able to control their actions and thus be “normal.” At this point, I’m sure a licensed therapist would throw a fit.
Of course, you can guess what happened. It turns out, for most people, emotions are like stomachaches. You tell yourself that you can ignore the pain and go through your daily routine (or at least I do) but then you end up sprawled on the toilet anyway — and no amount of persuasion, short of an incoming nuclear warhead, will budge you.
Depression and its related family of illnesses are the same way. On the outside, they seem to be rationally defeatable. But when you stare at them up close, they turn out to be far less benign. Even I lose control of my emotions sometimes; it just turns out that I have a higher threshold for emotional “pain” than most people. Mental illness, left untreated, is just that same pain turned up to a torturous level. The appearance of an inaccessible logic belies the breakdown of logic altogether.
3. Wickedness and Inevitability
With regards to the rich, they too are generally dividable into two castes. The first is easy to describe and requires fewer than two paragraphs. They are the cliché: the ones for whom the sound of two stones clicking together bears greater enjoyment and entertainment than their self-indulgent puppy-babble and consumerism. Their upside, however, is great: just as the poor are quickly fleeced of their earnings, they too are quickly fleeced of their savings (read: inheritance). One rich idiot can power the economy of a mid-sized county for at least a decade or two.
4. Ambition and Courage
The other caliber of the rich is far more interesting. Eliezer Yudkowsky, in one of his more accessible articles, describes the power-elite as actually being more intelligent and high-functioning than one would be led to believe. This is despite his and our general cultural assumption that “executives were just people who, by dint of superior charisma and butt-kissing, had managed to work their way to the top positions at the corporate hog trough.”
It is true, however, that socioeconomically, we could probably afford to pay them a slight bit less. The question becomes: how much less? What is the elasticity of the rich? If we decrease executive compensation by 1% across the board, what percentage of them decide instead to engage in more self-fulfilling activities? Or is it a situation similar to Ayn Rand’s world where they all suddenly quit after one last straw?
I suspect the answer is somewhere in between: that as we increase their taxes, some portion of the most qualified executives drop out of the rat race, but once we hit a certain point, the trickle becomes a torrent. Money is an important incentive. To much of the intelligentisia, it is valued as a unit of self-worth. Platitudes are endless; supply meeting demand ensures their worthlessness. Money is objective.
My solution would be to drastically increase the estate tax — although allow its proceeds to benefit a charity of the deceased’s choice. I generally trust the self-made rich: outside the financial world, there simply aren’t that many bozos that just get lucky. I don’t trust, however, their offspring. While genetics may count for something, it is a stretch to believe workaholic executives take the time to genuinely coach their children. I’d rather let the market be the judge of them.
Conclusion
If we exclude the poor with their educational, physical, and mental disabilities and the rich with their puppies or genuine capabilities, what do we have left? The middle class. A class of people for whom the gifts of an adequate education have already been bestowed, but who simply refused to make use of it. A class of people who chose comfort over nobility.
I do realize this is somewhat of an arbitrary cutoff point and that there are exceptions. Sure, some were unlucky in the gene pool or subject to unfortunate external circumstance. But all-in-all, the vast majority of the middle class seem useful for little more than paper pushing and water cooler conversation.
In my mind, the typifying example of this phenomenon is the baby-boomer generation. An entire generation that, due to some lucky combination of technological progress and diplomacy, lifts its collective asses into the middle class. And what do they proceed to do? Wreck the environment, bankrupt social security and medicare, lose the goodwill of hundreds of nations, and leave a spiraling national debt to fix everything with. And then, best of all, have the impudence to write a hit song whining that it wasn’t their fault.
Admittedly, this entire essay is not meant to be taken incredibly seriously: it has more holes in its logic than Wall Street has waylaid zeroes. It really is less a political manifesto and more a personal statement regarding free-will, education, and social responsibility with some leaky generalizations thrown in.
The main point I am trying to drive across is that our free will is limited by the choices we know how to make. The average American has the widest range of possibilities in the world: free primary/secondary education and world-class universities, a liberal passport that others would kill for, access to the strongest venture capital market. And yet, we make terrible use of it all.
It wouldn’t bother me so much if it weren’t so stunningly hypocritical. In listening to others air their views on a sensational crime, many have little but intense contempt towards the perpetrator. Note that only 32% of the incarcerated have high school degrees (compared to 90% in the general population). To me, their lack of education is a point of sympathy, not fury: environmental circumstance far outstrips any real degree of free-will. The real criminals are those who have choice but proudly choose selfishly. It seems to me that they have far more to account for. And yet, there’s no outrage here.
