Inuits have multiple words for ice and snow; the Yamanas from the Amazon have none. What individuals experience determines the social meanings they will construct. Thus embedding an Inuit (or American) into Yamana culture will lead to communication problems even if they otherwise speak the same language. This is a metaphor for how I felt returning from my long distance backpacking expeditions and being asked by friends about what these experiences were like. There was not enough overlap of shared experiences with modern culture to effectively communicate.
Over the four years since I first started writing Systems out of Balance I have struggled to come up with the right term for our third natural right that accompanies free will and free thought. I have an intuition, from my backpacking experiences I’m like Justice Potter and his view of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Yet I find there is not enough common experience with modern culture to construct a shared social meaning. The best I can do right now, after four years, is to call it the natural right to merited consequences; but perhaps next year I’ll call it something else again.
Let me start out with this the same way I did with “Essay 15 – Natural Conditions and Rights.” One of the bigger controversies among backpackers was whether to pack heavy or light. In “my day” the prevailing dogma was to pack heavy; now the prevailing dogma is to pack light. In reality there are advantages and disadvantages to both, and one answer does not fit the experiences of all. Essay 15 lists some of those advantages and disadvantages, the simple point for now is that by choosing one a backpacker accepts both the good and bad consequences of that choice without any cultural interference.
Two opposite philosophies, placed together, stress the importance of receiving both the good and bad consequences merited from our actions. The naturalism associated with the French Enlightenment stressed that humans naturally seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Social systems should be structured to foster the liberty of this pursuit.
In contrast, a Buddhist believes that salvation lies in suffering. Anger, desire and confusion are all forms of this suffering. Karma is a process by which we come to understand suffering and nirvana the result of understanding and final resolution of suffering. A western corollary to this view would be Homer’s contention: “For afterwards a man finds pleasure in his pains, when he has suffered long and wandered long.”
Putting the two philosophies together what we need from Nature, and what we are granted, is the right to the merited consequences of our actions, for better or worse. In other words, Nature allows us the proper homeostatic feedback for our actions; only Culture can monkey this up. Modern culture has compromised this natural right to an extent that many now seem incapable of recognizing it.
For example, take the eminent economic scholar from Harvard, Edwin Glaeser, who emphasized that liberty was all about the freedom of choice in the marketplace. In this regards he was parroting an idolized Nobel Laureate in economics, Milton Friedman. They both cherry picked evidence to champion business corporations, and I’ll wager a large sum that they both acquired stock. Both business corporations and stock are cultural entitlements only possible through a large amount of government intervention. More significantly, the wealth obtained from business corporations and stock is at least partly unmerited, and often wholly so.
Because of esteemed scholars like these modern culture has substituted greed for merit in such an insidious and thorough way that people no longer differentiate between the two. Even us folks in the middle class think we are entitled to our retirement accounts. A truly lucrative retirement account inflates earning without merit at best, and at worst takes money away from children currently working in a developing country. And retirement accounts are some of the more merited forms of investment, unlike the pure welfare that a hedge fund often represents. We are told that this reflects the merits of free investment markets at work, though free markets cannot coexist with the business corporation model.
This is why I suspect that meanings about natural rights, gained from wilderness backpacking experiences, may be tough to share with modern culture. The scholars, think tanks and dogmatic schools of thought trumpeting liberty the most generally are the ones most clueless. They confuse the meaning of liberty with indulgence. In a sense they are not to be blamed, their sheltered perspectives are devoid of the experiences to know what natural rights and true liberty are really about.
Fortunately, the middle class as a whole are more likely than puppet libertarians to have experienced “merited consequences” and know the true value of allowing our actions to merit both the good and the bad. But there are other cultural entitlements, other indulgences, being cloaked as liberties as well. Some of the most “sacred” of these cultural entitlements will be identified as such in the next few entries, to distinguish them from our natural rights. Modern culture suffers when confusing and sacrificing natural rights at the expense of cultural entitlements, but not in a way that will lead us all to nirvana.
Tags: Economic Misinformation, Free Market Merit, Middle Class Economics, Misinformation, Natural Rights
