unendorsed wordvomit (cw: ableism, scrupulosity, suicide, eugenics, DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT)

Discussion in 'Brainbent' started by The Frood Abides, Nov 29, 2015.

  1. The Frood Abides

    The Frood Abides Doesn't Know Where His Rug Is

    I read a post on tumblr that read, in part:

    "You don’t have to earn the right to live.

    You don’t have to be productive to deserve happiness.

    You don’t have to justify the space you take up in the world, the food you eat, the things you need physically or emotionally to keep moving forward another day. You deserve these things just because you are a living, breathing human being.

    You don’t have to earn the right to live."

    My instinctive response was no no no fuck you you're lying NO!

    This kind of thing makes me irrationally angry in ways I'm really not proud of. I want this to be true. Talking about "everyone deserves basic rights to food and shelter" is all very well, but if it is not physically possible to provide them, then "deserve" means nothing whatsoever. There are over seven billion people living on a planet with finite resources. Many of them live with levels of misery and danger that most people reading that Tumblr post couldn't even comprehend.

    All right, I say to myself, what about global Full Communism? Redistribute all resources all over the world and nobody would have the level of upper-middle-class American luxury that I'm accustomed to, but nobody would be miserable either.

    Two problems with that.

    One: we can observe that centrally planned communist societies do not allocate resources well and that they do not produce as many resources as the society I live in right now. This is borne out both by economic theory and historical events. Maybe cutthroat vicious market economies are the only way to produce this amount of wealth.

    (Guaranteed Basic Income is a solution I've seen suggested, and I really like it in principle, but I can't see how it would work either -- either we have closed borders, and everybody outside our nation continues to suffer/corporations continue to outsource jobs to places where people don't have the choice to not take a shitty job, or we have open borders, and people immigrate to the point where our economy can't support the guaranteed basic income for all of us anymore and we're back to a "work shitty jobs or die" situation for everybody. )

    Two: some people require more resources to live than others.
    I don't think anybody would deny that some disabled people require expensive accommodations. Sure, the curb-cutter effect is powerful and we could make the world a lot safer and more convenient for everybody in some ways -- but medication and medical supplies cost a lot, assistive technology costs a lot, caregiving costs a lot, all in terms of both resources and labor, no matter if this hypothetical situation uses "money" or not.

    It doesn't seem completely out of the question that if every living person was provided with the resources to live a safe and healthy life, within the limits of the current world's production... some people would have to be sacrificed for this to happen.

    "All lives matter, but some lives matter more than others." I either accept that some people's lives don't matter as much as other people's, all else being equal, or I accept that people I like and respect are just too much of a burden on society to live. (The reason I got so mad about that slatestarcodex post was that I was afraid it was true.)

    I think this is why I hold myself to such impossibly high standards. I can't be one of the Low Functioning Autistics or let my depression slow me down because if I do I might fall below the threshold of Acceptable Human Being. And I can't argue myself out of this. Most of my depressionbrain responds to logic. I can't logically refute the problem of human needs exceeding available resources.

    I fear if I accepted the full implications of this, I'd become a fuck-you-got-mine libertarian -- except I'm not hardworking or brilliant enough to do the bootstraps thing. I'd kill myself trying.

    What do you do when your moral instincts conflict with what you suspect to be the way the world works?

    My planned solution is "find out if I'm right, then act accordingly." But that's much easier said than done, and it doesn't stop me from worrying that my death and the deaths of people I love are morally obligatory.

    (OK... when I put it like that, it sounds insane. Someone smack me on the head and tell me I haven't solved the terrible secret behind the universe, I'm just in SSRI withdrawal...)
     
  2. Lib

    Lib Well-Known Member

    No, you're just in SSRI withdrawal. :P

    Communist societies not having historically worked well doesn't necessarily mean that the essential ideal of wealth redistribution is a bad one; it can just mean that the methods that have been tried are flawed. People not living up to ideals is common and shitty - be mad about that all you like, but it doesn't invalidate your ideals, just shows you that you have to keep making implementations foolproof. (Not necessarily you personally, you can't implement a societal change all by yourself, but you get my point.)

    And I think you're conflating mattering with monetary value. Maybe that's the case for you; maybe you think the only way to measure worth or mattering is in monetary value! But that kind of sprung out to me - like, you can say 'all lives matter equally, and so we will give each person the resources to have a decent living standard'. Maybe some people need more resources than others, but you're still valuing their life equally on a sense of 'does this person matter, should they be allowed to live', because you're giving them enough to have the same standard of living as others.

    (Also, a lot of medical stuff, including medications, is priced really high because of supply-and-demand and monopolies - think of the case of the HIV medication recently, where someone bought the patent and hiked up the price to a ridiculous degree, and someone else managed to undercut them with a similar formula costing several hundred times less. If you don't have prices based on capitalist ideas, including the idea that if you're the only one creating it you need to grab all the profit, then niche markets like medical needs will most likely rapidly drop in price.)

    Also, I would like to point out that the point of bootstraps is that it doesn't rely on hard work or brilliance, it relies on luck. Sure, the people who make it may have worked hard and been brilliant, but so did thousands more who just didn't get the lucky break.

    (GBI is a good solution, but it does need multiple places to implement it. Which they are doing, very slowly.)
     
    • Like x 2
  3. The Frood Abides

    The Frood Abides Doesn't Know Where His Rug Is

    That leaves the problem of "how do we decide what is necessary for an acceptable living standard for different people?" ...But that's a logistical issue, not an irreconcilable moral quandary, which is an improvement brain-wise.
    I am going to do my homework, look at cat pictures, and not read any more articles about economics or mental health treatment until I'm closer to my psychological baseline.
     
  4. liminal

    liminal I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me

    Humans are constantly expanding their carrying capacity, which is why we are experiencing an exponential growth curve typically associated with organisms that produce hundreds of thousands of babies of whom few make it to adult hood, as opposed to those with a breeding pattern of having few offspring with a high amount of parental care by comparison, who typically have a logarithmic growth curve, where a species levels out one it hits carrying capacity. Currently we are at 7 billion, however current scientists seem to suggest that our carrying capacity is ~10 billion, but probably higher than that, if more people started to go vegetarian (as food is a limiting factor). Even then, our population would not go into free fall, merely the number of people dying is roughly the same as the number of people being born.

    The brain wiring that is connected to things like autism, depression, schizophrenia, etc. did not occur until roughly the time of explosive creativity for tool use and art. While correlation does not equal causation, our species in it's modern form existing for thousands and thousands of years before that, with little to no advancement in tool usage and art, not unlike other hominid species that came before us. Also, mental disorders present differently in other cultures, and have different prognosis. My guess is, that a lot of the people who are disabled now would not have been nearly as disabled in another culture or era, where the different wiring would have been considered wither neutral or beneficial. Not unlike dyslexia, which is a disability but was actually a superpower during hunter gatherer days (aka the vast majority of our history as a species)

    Also consider the evidence that humans, other hominids, and on rare occasions other apes, have been observed, or have evidence of, taking care of their disabled kin.

    The idea of social darwinism- that some lives are more valuable than others, and this is something you can easily put a price tag on, is an incredibly modern invention, driven by people's misunderstanding of evolution combined with classism and prejudice.
     
    • Like x 5
  5. Vacuum Energy

    Vacuum Energy waterwheel on the stream of entropy

    I don't know if this is helpful, but when I'm on my antidepressants, these problems go from "FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM OF MY EXISTENCE I MUST SOLVE NOW" to "interesting thought experiment I can toy with when I have spoons available, and then put aside when I'm done". Frankly, I think the amount of influence I can exert on this kind of thing by putting a small amount of chemicals in my body is astounding.

    Depression tends to magnify existential and moral problems out of proportion, in my experience. It's a problem that bears working on, yes, but the vast majority of people are not constantly assaulted by these kinds of thoughts, and dwelling on these thoughts for too long tends to, paradoxically, make you less productive at solving them.
     
    • Like x 2
  6. The Frood Abides

    The Frood Abides Doesn't Know Where His Rug Is

    @liminal that's super interesting, and it's something I've thought about before (but conveniently forgot or dismissed when I was sad and stressed. Surprise!) Humanity is really complicated and a lot of qualities we unthinkingly see as burdens might have hidden, complex benefits.

    @Vacuum Energy ...that's an extremely accurate description of what this post was. I'm inclined to delete it out of embarrassment now that I'm more lucid, but I'll leave it up because Brainbent is Kintsugi's Tantrum Hole and it's probably useful to have the reminder that these thoughts and emotions happen and they're not exactly rational. For others as well as for me.
     
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