There are many ways society could operate. Whichever way it does operate, that set of conventions, rules, practices is biologically speaking an environment. Unless the system is extraordinarily comprehensive, some people will thrive wonderfully and others will falter or die. This is not necessarily because some people are overall superior and others inferior. Much of it is simply because some people naturally align well with the "artificial environment" of society's rules in that era, and others don't align well. In times past, and in some ways still, if you were a woman, there were so many ways it would have been drastically more difficult to thrive, through no actual fault or inferiority of your own or of being a woman, but rather through the fault and inferiority of the conventions, rules, practices of that era.
This notion generalizes. Increasing numbers of us understand both rationally and intuitively, from experience and education and intelligence and open-mindedness and empathy and compassion and just listening, that this principle of diversity versus conformity covers many genders and ethnicities and traits and persuasions. What the core realization means is that in any human era so far, if you are very successful, that is always, inevitably, in part because traits you did not choose line up well with the conventions, rules, practices of your time. You are at an advantage compared to others, and it is impossible to calculate, or perhaps even put a solid statement to, how much of that advantage is "fair" and how much is "unfair."
This is one reason progressive taxation makes sense. To the extent you are successful—and in our era this usually means financially—the rules of the social game are clearly in some kind of alignment with you. If this is difficult to agree with, think of it another way. There are rules that, were they changed, would reduce or nullify your success. You are benefitting or even depending on those rules. It is unlikely those rules are benefitting everyone. It is likely some will find them unfair, inadequate, even destructive. A person who feels perfectly at home working in upper management at Exxon is probably very well-off financially, but this is partly because fossil fuels are legal; if fossil fuels were illegal, that income would either dry up or turn illegal. The same person may be able to find another job that pays just as well, or may not. If they can, this is arguably because of other rules, conventions, practices. It's easier to see what I'm saying in the negative. Take away what your success depends on, socially. It didn't have to be there. The social environment could be different, and someone else would prefer it that way. And so paying tax for a system that's working very well for you makes sense, because you didn't create that system that's working very well for you.
I prefer not to use terms like "fair share," because they can be subjective. The logic I'm presenting is, I believe, more indestructible than some particular wording chosen to make an impression. The logic rests on one assumption: the laws could be different. They could. They have been different already. They are different from town to town, state to state, country to country. I'm basing logic on indisputable fact, because that's how logic works best. To put it in perhaps more concrete and immediate terms, a billionaire might not be a billionaire in another country. They might have been murdered, they might have died of typhoid. They might have taken out a loan to start a company and been robbed of it and never gotten another loan, and put in prison for not being able to pay the loan back. Or maybe education in that country would have made the population aware that what the prospective billionaire knows how to make and sell isn't so good for them. What I'm saying is not hypothetical.
Now I don't want to minimize anyone's efforts or contributions or talents or planning or good judgment or anything else. We need these, you need these, I need these, and I appreciate, strive for, and admire these when someone's doing them better. What I do want to do is speak in a kind of basic, scientific, almost mathematical way about the structures in society that don't necessarily have to be how they are. These are the kinds of structures that change over time, even that we agitate to change urgently, because some of us, most of us, notice ways that society could probably be working better, whether that's on a small scale or a large scale. By recognizing that every social convention, rule, or practice has already evolved into place, was another form of itself and earlier than that didn't exist at all, we free ourselves from the notion that the way of the world is fixed, permanent, immovable. The laws of physics seem to be. The laws of humanity seem very much not to be.
Who are you allowed to kill?
No, really, I'd like you to answer out loud. Who are you allowed to kill? The answer to this question tells you something direct, something about law and tradition. I'll give you a moment.
We eat "calamari" and "pork," yet it would be unconscionable in our culture to eat a dog.
Why?
Could the difference be traditional and emotional? I've chosen pigs and squid (being close siblings of octopuses) because their intelligence and even empathy are comparable to a dog's. If we favor dogs because they fawn on us, well, we must admit that we have bred them to fawn on us, so that's ethically problematic.
Even the most basic law that everyone across cultures can agree with, some variation on "Thou shalt not kill," is widely disregarded, and lawfully. You can smash a mosquito. You can wash a spider down the drain. You can agree to have your pet put to sleep. In most US states, you can still abort a fetus. In wars, killing seems to be not only tolerated but encouraged; "seeming" is important, because soldiers who wantonly kill civilians are responding to that seeming. Serial killers are still put to death in many places, and as you look around the world, there are many more reasons seen in cultures as acceptable or necessary conditions for putting someone to death. Killing is sometimes needed for self-defense. No one mourns cancer cells that are cut out, blasted with radiation, or poisoned. For economic survival and gain, it's usually seen as fine to cut down trees, and it's fine if this means animals depending on them die. I say "fine" intending a pun, because usually there aren't even fines. By and large, there aren't many good laws against driving an entire species to extinction. Many laws seem to support heightening the chances of humanity's extinction in the next hundred years or two. This one rule "everyone agrees on" around the world is not exactly a strict and perfect rule, is it?
So who are you allowed to kill?
What's the best rule?
The particular way it's expressed makes a difference, and the conditions around it make a difference. And those details will favor some living beings and disfavor others. And whatever the exact, more detailed form of the rule is, it'll be a rule humans came up with, one that was unspoken, unfollowed, even once unthought, and then it existed in different forms, and could exist in yet other forms, some of which may be kinder to human society and life on earth.
Whatever the rules are that make you possible, that make your success possible or likely, or impossible or unlikely, could have been another way.
This is a basic truth I think we must agree on if we are to be sane and always moving, at least a little bit, toward a better, healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable civilization.
We need to think freely about what can change. Thinking about changing anything does not harm anything. It's thinking. That's what's good about it: it's in a bubble. What you do in thinking is a little, personal sandbox experiment. You can derive insights without moving materials around or threatening anyone with the wrong kind of changes for them.
Many people seem to think that thinking—and its cousins speaking and conversing and debating and making and experiencing art—seem to do nothing, and therefore are a waste of time. Incorrect. All are strictly necessary ingredients of social and global progress. And much of this value is exactly their virtual nature, their safe, sandbox quality. We become insulted when we don't like the way another person is thinking, but this disrespects the biggest value of thought: it's in a sandbox, it's experimental, it's processing, it's simulating a path to anticipate mistakes and avoid them if possible. There's nothing wrong with turning up mistakes in simulation mode. That's exactly what it's for.
We should think differently about thinking, but let me put that aside. What I'm really fighting is status quo bias.
Status quo bias is pernicious. Big changes do need to happen first as little experiments, preferably. It is far more dangerous to gamble with millions of lives than it is to run some careful local experiments and then try to scale them up if they're successful. Status quo bias is helpful in preserving what works. And so it deceives us. It has us thinking that there's something better about tradition itself. It has us thinking there's something worse about saying or doing something that seems weird. It has us convinced we've all got to follow all the rules at all times. It even has us paranoid about the unspoken rules, which are unspoken because the unspoken ones are the most contingent, and by remaining largely unspoken, can change readily when the circumstances change. Status quo bias, respect for and pride in tradition, makes it harder for us to see the truth in what I've been saying above. And it's one of the biggest forces holding humanity back. Status quo bias is more dangerous than big corporations. There is nothing necessarily wrong with a big corporation. In a more equitable world, we could imagine that there would be nothing wrong with voting using money. But status quo bias, left unchecked, will always have serious downsides.
That is, until we have found the perfect society, or even one that's good enough. And we absolutely have not. And if you are content with it, I am not. I do not feel the present era is even close to something I would feel content with myself. The world of today is not good enough, not because it isn't amazing, stunning, and truly awe-inspiring, but because it is unfairly and unnecessarily destroying lives everywhere we look. These lives are not just human, not just animal. They include future lives. That is not good enough. Yes, everyone does die, but no, conventions, rules, and practices that unfairly and unnecessarily destroy lives are not good enough. Does my reasoning sound circular now? It is, a little bit, in the way I've presented it, without the endless examples that could be found, but I don't think it's really possible to disagree with it. That the present state of affairs is not good enough is self-evident. And if it's good enough for you, then I'm happy for you. This isn't about resentment. This is about destruction and changing conventions, rules, and practices in the face of it, to alleviate the destruction, to preserve life at large, to make it possible someday to settle on other worlds without the guilt and embarrassment and failure of having destroyed our own.
We do not really deserve to live on another planet unless we can garden this one beautifully, which to me means allowing lots of wild spaces and figuring out what to do with the different forms of life so that we may coexist. If we can't coexist with ourselves, how would we coexist with aliens? Asking about aliens may seem idle today, a sandbox question, a question in a bubble. But maybe we eat "calamari" and not dogs because cephalopod intelligence is the most alien intelligence on earth, compared to our own. And it is just that traditionally we do not recognize or care about this. If we survive, one day this question will not be in a bubble at all.
In some ways it isn't in a bubble and never was. When we think and discuss, we run a kind of experiment that, over time, can turn surprisingly constructive. Suspend disbelief with me for a few sentences. Maybe now is always a good time to solve problems we see in that bubble, when we pause and draw a circle around us for a moment and stop acting, and think; when we trace possibilities, imagine, fantasize, hypothesize, use counterfactuals, play Devil's advocate, support the underdog view, offer what hasn't been mentioned yet, discuss, argue, go into science fiction or empathy or compassion or art or science or experiences or ways to change rules that we considered permanent and effective.
You think I'm not being serious because I'm talking about playing with ideas. You think the most difficult problems are solved by refusing to goof off. You think there's something wrong with imagining changing an important law. The evidence on how effective solutions are found suggests otherwise. If the problem has already been solved, you ask an expert or perhaps metaphorically go to a library. That's a serious business. If the problem is unsolved, though, you probably have to loosen up and play. If you're feeling too moralistic and standard and full of shoulds, you'll miss what's wrong with morality, standards, and shoulds.
You still think that's small, don't you?
What if nothing is bigger?
And what if playing frees you up to think, with a little less distress and avoidance, about serious problems that do require more of us to think and collaborate? Alfred Hitchcock made horror movies, but on set, he called them comedies. When he and the cast felt stuck on a problem, he'd point out that they were being too serious, and he'd tell an irrelevant but entertaining story. People who worked with him related that after this, the group would mysteriously find it easy to solve their problem. Creativity researchers today understand that this is actually normal. They would expect it. When people have severe illnesses, they joke about it. I saw it regularly in months of chemotherapy for cancer, when I was in chemotherapy myself. When I went in for surgery, I was scared, but no joke from friends or family was wrong. At funerals, laughter can be uplifting. This isn't all frivolous. Some of it actually solves problems, or gives us the strength to approach them.
We likely won't vaporize earth, but it's easy to imagine—realistically imagine—scenarios that render it so inhospitable that we wouldn't go here in a space suit.
These are basic housekeeping concerns we cannot ignore as a species.
