There's no distributive reason why everyone shouldn't be given a key to an apartment and a small but adequate allowance at 18, with an option to trade up on evidence of talent and effort. (However those are measured.)
Part of the moral frame which makes this impossible is the implied consensus that 'people are lazy' and if this were done they would be 'unwilling to work.'The other part of the moral frame is that 'I am not my brother's keeper' - we have some small token collective responsibilities, but we're emphatically not supposed to be responsible for each other.
There's nothing about this morality which is set in stone. It would be possible to turn it around - instead of labelling 'capitalist failure' as unacceptable and deserving of punishment, 'acquisitive sociopathy' could be seen as immoral. As would other kinds of anti-social behaviour, including environmental destruction.
This soon triggers conditioned associations of oppresive socialism and images of projects and tower blocks.
But that kind of social housing was a band-aid which missed the underlying point, which is that spontaneous social contribution is infinitely more valuable and fun than the kind of regimented authoritarian approach common in communist countries - and also capitalist ones, using different methods.
We've never seen a culture which explicitly values what people choose to give spontaneously. So far every culture has assumed that contributions have to be mandated by force, by competition for status and position, and by punishment for failure.
Real freedom would mean exploring what was possible without that authoritarian overlay. And I wouldn't be surprised if common social problems - addiction, crime, other kinds of dysfunction - were massively less prevalent in that kind of culture.
I agree. Few people even in America will argue against public education. The whole idea behind public education was that it would give all Americans an equal start regardless of their background. Now we live in an age where a HS diploma is necessary but having nothing more is like the equivalent of grandma only having an 8th grade education. It's simply not enough. I suspect people without any college or vocational education are more likely to be the same people who will need the social safety nets we resent people for needing. So if we really think all people deserve an equal start regardless of their background, and if we hate having to come to the rescue of the destitute, why not collectively invest the money up front so that much fewer people find themselves reliant on public resources later on? Because poor people are ungrateful freeloaders. Dontcha know? They are just going to live off us like vampires and contribute nothing to society. This is the moral judgement we pass. Forget that the security of a garanteed -however small- income and a roof over one's head probably goes a long way toward preventing people from turning to crime and substance abuse in order to survive. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
I grew up in culture that exemplified that moral judgement, and believed it myself for half my life. And yet, I've come to wonder: what does Paris Hilton contribute to society, other than a few punch lines for the evening talk shows? What has Richard Melon Scaife contributed, other than catapulting the self-fulfilling propaganda that justifies his wealth and privilege? Who are the vampires, and who are the victims? Somewhere in cyberspace, the ghost of de Chardin is smiling.
In today's celebrity obsessed culture people think she is interesting and her behaviour is newws. It keeps people in jobs in magazines and on telly cos other less-famous airheads want to read about such people.
It just shows that it's easy to get rich if you're already rich. keep to the Fen Causeway
Part of the moral frame which makes this impossible is the implied consensus that 'people are lazy' and if this were done they would be 'unwilling to work.'
i bet many of those people who are 'lazy and unwilling to work' would work hard if their job had meaning and some amusement value, as well as a living wage.
some people are ambitious, but not necessarily in a commercial sense. with a dismal array of mcjobs to chose from, they become disenchanted and become lazy from that.
of course, one man's 'chilled' is another man's 'lazy'! The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
When were we looking for such a culture? What do we really know about all and every indigenous culture around the world? They were just run over by the 'progress' and forceful colonization, and then we assume Victorian relations of the most advancing, the privileged and the fittest everywhere. Even if a culture was lucky not to be wrecked by rich interests, people like to imitate the apparently most successful attitudes - so even if all cultures now are dominated by money making and individual primacies, that does not mean that all they fit into the same selfish 'nature' while they were more isolated.
If we wish to compare individual selfishness in cultures, noticing only similar patterns does very little of the job. Differentiation of cultures 'more selfish than others' or 'less selfish than others' easily turns politically sensitive, but if there is 'natural selection' for individual selfishness, differentiation is what matters. Are most peoples really so badly and progressively anti-social?
