Huh!? Not everyone wants to be a president, doctor, poet etc. Or even achieve any special advantage. But are there really people who wish to have sub-standard health care, education, housing and disposable income? I don’t think so.
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Yes. Everyone wants to be wealthy and have privilege. What if levelling wasn’t ‘up’?
Would everyone be happy living in state assigned accommodation, on basic healthcare and age 69 retirement?
That would be an equal society. Or isn’t that the equal you were thinking?
Interesting tangents here.
I am an immigrant, the son of an immigrant and a British person, but have never thought of myself using that word even though I’m quite aware of my non-Britishness.
Regarding travelling and working elsewhere, as much as anything that’s a state of mind far, far more than money. But for many, learning another language enough to get by seems to be a really hard slog for most people of British origin. It may also help those who are not British, that the world of entertainment is dominated by English-speaking material, giving peoples of other nations opportunity to pick up some language that has passed by Brits because of their privileged position in the language hierarchy.
Inequality is an interesting thing. I’m happy for there to be extreme inequality provided those at the bottom can have somewhere safe and suitable to live, to stay warm and enough decent food that they aren’t hungry. It doesn’t have to be easy but it also shouldn’t be desperate. People are made unequal - some are able and some are not, some energetic and some slow or lazy, some determined and some laid back. Some are guileless and innocent while others instinctively know how to manipulate and coerce their fellow men as we even see occasionally in the forum and is normal in those countries we call ‘communist’. I’m not at all sure humans can really live at a single level of existence together for any length of time.
Whether inequality is just is quite another matter, but I’m not at all sure it is ‘unjust’.
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I agree with your comment, but I use the term ‘get by’ in response to people who ask if I speak French. I do speak French every day, and have conversations in French, with French friends. But I am by no way fluent, so I think it is appropriate to say ‘I get by’.
It is not always an excuse…
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I agree with that, and it describes me too with the added disadvantage that I have a hearing problem which means I can’t be sure that I have got exactly what has been said. I also have that problem in English but, as it is my birth language I can interpret and read the language much easier.
Have you booked new appt with ORL David?
ORL? Not sure what that is but no, I was hoping the doctor would give me a contact name and number but just an ordonnance.
Have replied on relevant thread…
ORL = Ear, nose and throat department/consultant
Probably not.
Karl Marx has a glorious dream, “his idea of utopia was a land where people laboured as they were able, and everyone shared the wealth.”
So far so good. The problem came in the application.
The problem was that someone had to run things. These someones found that power tantalisingly offered them advantage. And inequality was back.
There are still a handful of countries self identifying as communist but essentially they are dictatorships with cherry picked aspects of communism. And certainly, some are still much more equal than others.
The core problem with an ideal of equality for all is that we are humans. Removing the possibility of personal advantage removes the drive.
It is not that everyone does not deserve a safe home, enough food and education but no one wants someone else to decide who gets what, nor prevent them from achieving more than others if they can.
In UK, why do parents make so much effort and personal sacrifices to send their children to a good school? State schooling is equal for all. Problem is, it is equally less good. If a person in UK can afford private healthcare, should they be obliged to use NHS free healthcare and wait two years for a hip replacement? Lots of equal people waiting in that queue.
It may not be a perfect world, where everyone in every country has exactly the same advantages. But until we can effect a basic change of human nature, or some cataclysmic event causes us to have a collective revaluation, it is wise to know who we are.
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Equality for me is everybody having the same oppourtunities without buying there way in. What you do with the oppourtunity is another question.
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This is why education for every child is so critical
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But not by paying to pass your exams
You really, really need to read Rutger Bregman’s Humankind Susannah.
The idea that ‘human nature’ inclines us to be anything other than kind, thoughtful and just is simply not supported by historical fact. Moreover, it is easy to trace - and disprove - the ridiculous distortions from Hobbes to Pinker that have propagated the idea that our species is anything other than fundamentally decent.
Before we assume we know ‘who we are’, we should perhaps check out the actual evidence…
I wish I could agree.
But the evidence shows that, while individuals are capable of great acts of kindness, we have a tendency (as @Susannah suggests) towards selfishness.
By the way, one of the key criticisms of Bregman’s book was the almost complete lack of scientific content in it. There’s no harm in having an opinion, of course.
There is much to commend the content of Humankind. Quite an optimistic counter to current predictions elsewhere
It seems the world is now on the brink of significant changes. Which way it will proceed may well depend on human nature.
You’re a quick reader!
Not exactly. Most people have an impetus towards self-interest .
Selfishness involves doing what you want at other people’s expense. Self-interest involves doing what you want but can include others’ good, one of the richest sources of own good there is.
Humankind seems to favour ethics in the debate of ethics v. self interest in mankind.
Ethics, in a nutshell, is a philosophy of compromising private gain for public interest, fundamentally acting beyond our own self-interests.
The difficulty is that human nature is incredibly complex with exponential variations of time and culture and politics and economics. Ethics and self-interest can and do overlap. Shades of grey. Can we be ethical without considering others and acting in ways that benefit them? Sometimes. Can we act in self-interest and still be ethical? Yes.
Some philosophies have fallen by the wayside over time. Thomas Hobbes, was a 17th century philosopher who tried to base ethics on self-interest. He was also adamant the country needed to put all its trust is a king. Not so followed now. Evolved.
Mr Bregman’s philosophy is very positive and we may all wish it to be true. Then there will be no need to build walls and put up barbed wire at the border.
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We’re not going to agree on the distinction between selfishness and self-interest, or even the definition of ethics, I see!
Thinking about the book, though, what pieces of evidence/research in Bregman’s book did you find the most persuasive, @Susannah?
I’d never heard of Bregmans book - this was the first review on Amazon:
It seems some people want to write their own creation story. I’ve viewed politics as being a form of religion (and religion sometimes as a form of politics) for a while now, so perhaps it should not be a surprise that the idea of unspoiled humanity would be borrowed and recycled for this purpose.
0bviously I’ve not read it.
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