What is it about this incorrect idea of justice that is correct? Because Marx wasn’t on to nothing. There is a sense of injustice that he and others like him were attempting to correct. We’ve just shown, and history has also shown, that despite its best intentions, when used as a guiding, defining moral calculus, that it’s actually counterproductive. Counterproductive by necessity. That’s a big hurdle to get over.
But there is a problem there we are grasping at. And it needs to be taken into account. The tendency of unequal outcomes, as well as the further tendency of the competitive structure to become oppressive and heartless and even tyrannical. It is hard that life presents us with such variances to deal with, when we would wish them to be otherwise.
Psychologically and practically, the best thing might be to accept them and figure out how to work within them. But insofar as we can alter them of their affects for ourselves and for others, how much is an appropriate amount to focus on such things? What obstacles are unnecessary and can and should be removed? What effects and results can and should be removed? Understanding that the removal of even whole classes of obstacles does not guarantee success or preclude failure.
Clearly its an instinctive moral instinct to be upset at this kind of injustice. Or maybe it is even natural to be upset at this kind of justice? It is a category of suffering, it is an area for potential improvement. It’s just not the sort of thing you can go all in on without actually making things worse. Competition is harsh, and it does create losers. But it also develops winners, it forces adaptation that makes winning possible (which in turn create comparative disadvantages that discourage losing strategies). And since the primary tendency of life, which is harsh, complicated, and challenging, is to produce losers, not winners, then the competitive structure is actually a necessary institution. It’s good for us in the deepest, most important ways.
Unfortunately, because of how the world works and how people works, there are going to be a lot of bad results on the level of surface conditions, on the way to producing survival and winners, both in terms of the situations people are in, what they have to deal with in the world, what obstacles they face in themselves, and a whole lot of sub-optinal outcomes. None of these are moral evils, per se, they don’t count against the value of the people. But they still represent an enormous negative practical impact on our lives.
Of course some people might argue that the race is over. We won. Adaptation, growth, the struggle to survive, all that is over. We’ve achieved security and mastered the challenges of life. We no longer need the kind of harsh survival strategies that once served us. In today’s world, they’re unnecessary, even a liability. We can now relax and just enjoy ourselves. Be free from the terror of the competitive structure and struggle, and just enjoy ourselves. And since pursuing our own selves is our new luxurious goal, we don’t need all those other oppressive structures. Our security and freedom in the expression of our identity and pursuit of iursoeevs and our own fulfillment and pleasure is all we require to be happy now.
That, I think, is the vision. We grew beyond the need for God, or evolution, or what have you. And the new God is revealed, and it’s ourselves. We don’t need the power of old religions or ideologies or cultures to support us or direct us or restrict us. As Elsa sang in Frozen 2, “I am the one I’ve been waiting for all my life.” That’s a mythology for the modern child. A dream to pursue.
I suppose the only problematic question is, is that enough? Are we really so secure? Have we got the universe so much by the tail as all that? And is the fulfillment of ourselves in ourselves really enough to make us happy? Is our mastubatory fantasy world fulfilling enough to sustain the life of humanity? I suppose that’s a bit like asking whether pornography is sufficient for the continuation of the human race.
Part of the problem with declaring equality of outcomes, and why it ends so poorly, is that it removes the natural feedback mechanisms that’s humans need to navigate and discriminate between possible choices and futures. If you assume that all possible choices and futures are equivalent, then that’s fine. But if you are in any way wrong about that key assertion, you’re literally blinding people and taking away their only means to discovering how to avoid worse outcomes and secure good outcomes. In fact, acting as if walking in any given direction will by necessity result in equivalent outcomes is far more likely to result in an increase of actual disparate outcomes (or at least an increase in bad ones) than it is to result in either uniformity of outcomes or (especially) uniformity of good outcomes. This is the sort of experiment that can easily be conducted in any ordinary natural space with a large group of people simply by observing what actually happens. I’m sure there is a counter experiment you could run to point out the problems with and advantages of a traditional competitive approach that doesn’t make such assumptions, but it seems a bit silly to imagine something so obvious and sensible. People will not arrive equally at the goal, because of where in the terrain they are placed and their own capabilities. But a lot more people will actually ultimately arrive. And that seems to be the lesson of economic history, as well.
Making Nobody Happy 