Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Class Warfare Page 3 of 36

How Should CEOs And Politicians Be Punished For the Evil They Do?

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On March 28, 2023

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Came across this tweet about the Philadelphia water spillage the other day:

So, shit happens and sometimes truly, no one is really to blame. But a lot of bad things which happen are a result of deliberate negligence or direct action. A good example is PG&E, the California power utility, which hasn’t been bothering to clear the areas around power poles and transmission poles or replace or repair old power poles. They knew this would lead to more forest fires and it did and people lost everything, including their lives, in some of those fires. PG&E had the money to do the maintenance but preferred to pay larger dividends and give more stock options to executives.

So the chemical spilled into Philadelphia’s water supply were spilled by a private company. We don’t know if negligence was the issue, but if it was, what should be the punishment?

Lately we tend to just fine companies, but that does nothing, especially as the fines are often less than the amount of money they made thru being negligent, and in any case, fines don’t remove the massive money executives already made from their actions, nor the money the owners made.

Clearly fines don’t work.

The first issue is the question of limited liability for shareholders and the use of corporations as shields for executives. There were sound reasons for limited liability for owners who really don’t control corporations, with unlimited liability people wouldn’t want to invest in companies and when primary issue of stock was a major, or the major source for creating new companies, new corporation creation would have collapsed without limited liability.

But the disadvantage of limited liability is, indeed, that corporations tend to do evil acts knowing that their owners won’t pay the full price for them, and the way corporate executives and decision-makers tend not to go to jail for actions that an individual would go to jail for (or be liable for personally in civil court) is causing huge problems.

I think we’re going to have to remove these shields, in the case of anything where a reasonable person would know that harm was likely to occur. If you make the decisions or get the benefits, you are on the hook, and you need to be on the hook for more than you made.

But there’s another question. What is the correct punishment beyond financial, because a lot of the crimes aren’t crimes where money can make the victims whole?

Perhaps with respect to polluters, for example, the executives might be made to partake of their pollution. “This is what people drank, you will drink the same.” Or “this is what people breathed for days that caused cancer, you too will breath it.”

There’s a certain eye-for-an-eye beauty to this, but I dislike doing evil to people even when they have done evil because it’s still doing evil.

I would suggest instead a simple rule. Take back all the money them made while in charge, then take enough to bankrupt them. Next, since they have shown they can’t be trusted, forbid them from any position of authority in any organization: no management or executive or board positions, no legal ability to control anything. All their possessions in the future must be controlled by an executor appointed by the government.

For truly significant harm, we might say that they are no longer allowed to work, but must subsist on whatever welfare or other provisions are provided for the indigent. Given background checks, this is often what happens to criminals: no one will hire them.

(Doing this to important people would likely lead to a significant improvement in the welfare system.)

These should probably be time gated. Ten years minimum, thirty year max, with the possibility of “parole” where they’re allowed to have a low level responsible positions, like foreman or control over their own assets while someone watches over their shoulder to see how they do.

All such rules, of course, must be done with the presumption of control. If you’re CEO or a board member, you don’t get to dodge any decision you should have known about. You don’t get to blame managers or grunts.

What sort of solution do you think would work to stop corporate malfeasance (or political)? Put it in comments.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Remembering Who The Nazis Killed First

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On March 14, 2023

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Niemoller:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

So, the list isn’t exhaustive, there’s no mention of gays and Gypsies/Roma, for example. No one ever seems to talk about the Roma but as a percentage of their population they got it worse than the Jews did.

But forget that. It seems all we talk about is the tragedy of the Jews, but notice they weren’t killed first. First it was the socialists, then it was trade unionists.

This is because the Nazis first killed those who were an actual threat, then went on to kill those they hated (and who money they could steal without upsetting the majority of the population.)

Liberals always make deals with fascists or reactionaries who take over their countries. They generally do quite well out of them, corporate officers saw their incomes soar under Hitler. The argument between liberal and fascist is an argument over brothers about who should rule their father’s house: fascists treat capitalists and business well, they just need to know their place.

The left can’t make deals, because they are in fundamental opposition. This is true of fascists, who kill left-wingers, but it is also true of making deals with liberals. As Corbyn and Lula recently proved, even the mildest of leftists can’t cut a deal with liberals, because liberals don’t see the left as legitimate.

It should be pointed out that this was true of FDR, as well. The rich and the right never forgave him, always hated him, and spent generations undoing what he had done. Every time you see an attack on so-called entitlements,  understand that is part of the right’s long war to destroy FDR’s legacy.

I would put FDR on the left, though some wouldn’t and I understand why. FDR saved capitalism from the capitalists, who had no idea how to fix it and wouldn’t listen to those who did, like Keynes. If your left-wing beliefs mean the absolute destruction of capitalism, and quite possibly they should, then FDR was an enemy, though I see him a different way.

FDR created a system under which capitalism could work and could raise all boats. It did that until the 70s and then failed. FDR was the “can this system work?” attempt.

The answer, for a number of reasons, many of which I’ve written about other places (see “The Decline and Fall of Post War Liberalism and the Rise of Neoliberalism” to start) is NO, capitalism can’t actually work to raise all boats over the long term. What looks like capitalism raising all boats isn’t, it’s industrialization. Under FDR’s policies and those that continued to the late 60s or so, though diluted, inequality fell and fell and fell. Those policies had issues, but as we’ll discuss in my series on the great ideologies, the solution was to fix those problems, as with the 60s civil liberties movement, not to get rid of the system wholesale.

But we did because capitalism, even carefully controlled, always allows a few people to control too much money and thus power and those people always want more and are able to work to get more since they can hire and sponsor large numbers of people to work to destroy any egalitarian system. This is what the rich did with, among other things, their sponsorship of business schools and economics departments. Though forgotten by most today, few men did more to destroy equality and an economy which distributed wealth and income more than the economist Milton Friedman.

The rich—remember. They remember 90% tax rates. They remember estate taxes which broke up their wealth. They remember the period in which they had to give up their estates and their servants. They remember. And they hate.

And so even a mild left winger like Corbyn or Sanders, who’s want 60s economic policies with a side of social justice and think that maybe you shouldn’t run Apartheid states are seen as a mortal threat and that’s because, well, they are. Ninety percent top marginal rates, estate taxes and re-nationalization plus re-regulation of industry and breaking up the huge conglomerates would be absolutely disastrous for those who run our economy and control our politicians.

Remember that when Corbyn looked like he might win the UK Prime Ministership, there were actual threats of a military coup.

Understanding this relationship is important for anyone on the left, even those who are on the very moderate FDR fringe. Liberals will never accept you in power and will do everything they can to stop you. Notice the assassinations of the 60s: two Kennedy brothers, MLK and Malcom X. The liberals won’t mass murder, but if they must they will kill leaders and they will mass deport as they did after World War I. The fascists, well, they’ll just liquidate as much of the left as they can find and anyone who thinks this can’t happen in their country is whistling past their grave.

Finally, let’s point out that markets and capitalism are not the same thing. Markets are useful and have existed for thousands of years.  One solution set for destroying capitalism involves finding a way to get the good out of markets without the evil, turning them into servants, rather than the mechanism by which we choose our masters.

Another is to find a way to make economic decisions and distribute goods which doesn’t require markets. That one attempt to do so failed does not mean it is impossible, simply that we have not yet done it at scale in a way which works.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Core Of Class Struggle From Below

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On February 15, 2023

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Is just “all our lives will be good, or yours won’t be.”

Since there’s always some idiot who reads these posts and thinks they’re smart, no this doesn’t mean everything turns out identical or that some people won’t get cancer.

It means everyone gets enough if society has it, and gets treated fairly. It means that if a rich or powerful person gets cancer they get the exact same treatment the poorest and weakest person in society does. It means money and power can’t get you anything that actually matters: not education, not health care, not food when other people are going hungry.

“No one gets seconds until everyone has had firsts.” And no one gets thirds till everyone who wants them has had seconds.

The job of actual class struggle is to make it so that the rich and powerful can’t enjoy their wealth and power until everyone is taken care of and treated the same.

This is why the gays got Obama to support gay marriage by the way. It seems to be forgotten by Obama was an anti gay marriage bigot who recorded a call against gay marriage and whose chaplain for his inauguration was anti-gay marriage. So the gays, a lot of whom had carried water for  him during the election did two things: they cut off the donations, hard, and they went after his wife: broke into a fundraising party and made her life miserable.

Oh, the squeals. The hand-wringing.

But it was pretty mild, she gets to be famous and rich because of her husband and she carried  his water, for sure. She can take a little screaming and if she can’t, too bad.

But as I said, this is mild. Things will be serious when people start saying “if you make one of us dead or homeless, we make one of you dead or homeless.”

We’re all in the same life raft, or we aren’t and if we aren’t, then the only solution is to put us in the same raft and make the powerful bail and drown with the rest of us.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Britain Stops Making Vaccine Available (But the Rich Will Still Get It)

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On February 1, 2023

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So, here we go:

Now, I want to point out again, that at Davos, where the rich and powerful meet to decide the fate of the world, everyone has to be vaccinated, and has to be tested and if they aren’t or they test positive, their badges are deactivated.

In other words, the rich get vaccinated. Current vaccines are pretty shitty, because they haven’t been keeping up with the mutation speed, but they’re still better than nothing, and do reduce the seriousness of cases.

But that’s not really the point: the point is that for the rich the cost of vaccine (Modern is raising it from $26 to $110 to $130 in the US) is meaningless to our lords and masters: they don’t even notice $120: they spend more, much more, for lunch. But to ordinary people such a price can be the difference between eating or paying the rent. If it has to go, it goes.

One policy for the rich, who can afford bespoke medicine, and another for the plebes.

This is also terrible public health policy. While the vaccines don’t prevent spread, they do reduce viral load in infected individuals, and thus reduce the odds people around them will get infected. Mass vaccination (note that it is voluntary) is a good thing.

Leaving aside the whole “death” thing, there has been so much disabling due to Covid that the Bank of England, hardly touchy-feely compassionate sorts have noticed it with alarm, so even if you, like our lords and masters, are functionally a psychopath, this is going to continue to cause disaster in the economy.

But then labor shortages and supply chain problems have been used as an excuse to raise prices much higher than cost increases, so from the point of view of the ruling class, who is this their problem? They’re getting richer; they make sure the people around them are tested and vaccinated and most of them can work from home and even before Covid lived inside carefully vetted bubbles. And if they do get sick, they’ll get the best care, far better than you will.

So, really, Covid continues to be win-win-win for the ruling class and who cares if it’s a mass death, mass disabling event of the sheep they rule over?

WIN! From WIN to WIN. That’s what it’s like to be in the ruling class. Even a pandemic that kills millions is just another profit opportunity.

Too bad you aren’t a member.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Know Thine Enemy

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On January 27, 2023

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I want you to ask yourself this question: what makes someone your enemy? Really think about it for a bit before continuing. Have an answer.

An enemy is someone who is doing you you harm, or intends to do you harm. If they have the ability to do you harm, they will act on it.

Note what this definition does not include. It says nothing about hate or anger or emotional state. It does not matter why someone is or wants or intends to harm you, all that matters is that they do.

It does also not matter if you are collateral damage: if they don’t even know you personally exist. If they’re willing to harm you to get what they want, without caring one way or another about you, they’re your enemy.

If a political leader passes a law or regulation which takes away your health care or your house or your food or your life, it doesn’t matter that they weren’t thinking about you, specifically, when they made that decision. They deliberately harmed you, and they were OK with it. They certainly knew, if they thought about it all, that it would harm some people, and that wasn’t a problem for them.

When healthcare execs raise the prices of medicines like insulin or care, they know that means some people who need that medicine or care will do without, and they know some people will die. If they don’t need to make the decision “If we don’t do this, we’ll go bankrupt and no one will get care” then they’re good with a bunch of people suffering or dying. They are, therefore, those people’s enemies, and they are a potential enemy for anyone who might one day not be able to afford care.

Your greatest enemies, that is the people who are most likely to make decisions which harm you, are almost always your politicians and corporate leaders. These are also the people who could be your greatest allies, if they chose, as FDR did for most Americans (though he was an enemy of the rich, and both he and they understood that.)

If you are thinking about politics this is the most fundamental concept you need to understand and emotionally internalize. People with power are your greatest enemies or your greatest allies, and your job is to make them your allies. If they are your enemies, and almost all of them in the current world are, then you must treat them as an enemy, and never think of them as a friend or ally.

For about 50 years, politicians and private wealthy individuals have deliberately pursued policies which have impoverished you. If your income had increased at the same rate as productivity, you’d have about twice as much income. Think about that. The reason you don’t is they took all of that (and more) and made sure it went to people who were already rich.

People who intend to or do harm you are your enemies.

This means, by the way, that unless you are a Ukrainian, Putin is not much of an enemy to you. Your own politicians and rich people are almost always the greatest threat to you if you live in a developed country, and if you live in an undeveloped country it’s sometimes leaders of foreign nations, the IMF, foreign corporations and so on.

It isn’t any more complicated than that. At the World Economic Forum at Davos, everyone gets a Covid test and all rooms have HEPA filters and UV light to destroy viruses. That’s how they treat themselves. Our societies could afford to do that for everyone, but our leaders, and the media they control pretend that Covid is “over”, while protecting themselves.

Your enemies. (Well unless you’re reading this and in the charmed circle, in which case they’re your allies. Just remember, in 50 years your class will be reviled and hated more than we revile and hate Hitler today.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

A Story About How Health Care Privatization Happens

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On January 25, 2023

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So, as many readers know, I got cancer. (I’m fine. It’s treated, I won’t die of it (3% chance some years out), though I’m on hormone blockers (moderately nasty as an adult) for as much as another year.)

Anyway, I got cancer while Covid was on, so a lot of my visits were virtual, or just phone calls, unless they really required my physical presence. Three month followups: usually by phone. Faster for the doctor; faster for me, all good. But the last time I went in the waiting room was packed. I waited for hours, and the nurse apologized “the government won’t let us do followups by phone (or virtually) any more.”

Oh. Weird. Made no sense to me, but governments do stupid things all the time, and despite how I make my living I didn’t think about it much. (Doctor’s visits tend to focus my mind elsewhere.)

Ontario’s been in a deepening health care crisis for a couple decades at least. In a lot of cities, if you don’t have a family doctor, it’s essentially impossible to find one. If your current doc retires, too bad. Toronto, the largest city, is the worst. So lots of clinics sprung up, and you’d go to one of them when you got sick. They started offering virtual visits even before the pandemic.

All of this was covered by public health: you never paid for any of it. The provincial plan is called OHIP, and it’s still a sacred cow.

A spokesperson for the Deputy Premier and Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones, told CTV News Toronto, “It is against the law to charge for OHIP-covered services. If the ministry finds that a person has paid for an insured service or some component of an insured service, there is a mechanism in place for the ministry to ensure that the full amount of the payment is returned to that person. Ontarians who believe they have been charged for an insured service should contact the ministry by e-mail at protectpublichealthcare@ontario.ca or by phone (toll-free) at 1-888-662-6613.”

On Wednesday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he doesn’t want patients paying out of pocket for medical expenses.

“We also need to be clear, Ontarians will always access the healthcare they need with their OHIP card, never their credit card,” said Ford.

Sounds great, eh? The principle is that if it’s covered under the government plan physicians who take any money from the plan at all can’t charge: you’re either fully private or in the system. This is supposed to be true across Canada, and for a long time it almost always was. (Except in Quebec, where they use ethnic pride to allow extra lots of corruption. See “Brexit” for a recent high profile Anglo version of this.)

But about the same time I was sitting on my ass needlessly the Ford government in Ontario also changed another regulation: OHIP would no longer pay for virtual visits to clinics (or in a clinic with a telepresence doctor) if there hadn’t been a physical examination by that clinic or doctor in the last year.

THUD. People go to clinics because they don’t have a relationship with a family doctor. If they had a physical exam every year there’d be a relationship: that’s what family doctors do. Those “regular checkups”.

Have you seen the kicker?

If OHIP doesn’t cover it, then you can charge for it. Since virtual visits with doctors and clinics who haven’t phsycally examined you are not covered, they can be charged for.

Meanwhile, Galen Weston, probably the most influential and powerful Billionaire in Ontario, who owns both the most supermarkets (where he has clinics) and the biggest drug store chain (Shopper’s Drug Store, which he was allowed to buy a few years ago), had rolled out a virtual visit service. Don’t know how well it was doing, but I do know that the public health care line you call to be told what to do is now referring people to services like it.

It’s called Maple. Here’s the current pricing.

In my entire life I have literally never paid for a doctor’s visit. Not once. Not ever. Not even a virtual visit with an online clinic last year before this new regulation so I could renew some meds.

But this isn’t covered any more, so it’s legal.

And that’s one of the mechanics of stealth-privatizing healthcare.

Note that while it’s hard to get a family doctor, it’s a growing problem and most people still have them, so this is a boiling frog issue: a majority of people won’t be affected. Yet. And most people can afford $80. But this is how you do it, step by step.

And in a certain way, it’s a BIG step, because as I say, I’ve never paid. Neither have most Canadians. If I need healthcare I may have to wait sometimes (though usually not more than a couple hours), but it’s free.

This is a strike against that. You get people used to paying for some services and slowly expand which ones and pretty soon you’re paying for a lot more. Another similar step was to allow pharmacists to renew most prescriptions: but it isn’t a covered service and they can charge for it. Only $15, but I’ve never paid for a prescription in my life either. And phone renewals of prescriptions with doctors aren’t covered either, so most of them are now charging for them, though that’s been true for a while.

Step, by step. Meanwhile, under-fund the system, overwork doctors and nurses and technicians and make the quality of care worse and worse. Over decades don’t train enough doctors or nurses to start with, then use Covid to decrease supply even more and push doctors and nurses out of the public system into the private system where they don’t have to work 12 hour+ shifts over and over and aren’t expected to get Covid over and over. (In one previous visit three of the four radiation oncologists were out with Covid, another longer wait, because we refuse to ventilate, HEPA filter, use UV light and mandate N95 masks rather than cloth ones.)

I have quipped before that I’m very glad I got cancer now, because in 10 years I’m not sure I’d be able to get care. The system now is creaking, but it still more or less works if you’re really sick. But the real money in privatization is market pricing for the truly desperate, like people who have cancer.

One final point: these people make their fortunes, literally, by making you sick and making it more likely you die. That’s what they do. They are your enemies, wherever they are because anyone who is taking active steps which make it more likely for you to die, to not get healthcare you need or to become impoverished or homeless is your enemy if anyone is. We just pretend they aren’t our enemies, mortal enemies, in fact, because they operate through the system by the rules; rules they made.

More on that later.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Red Queen’s Race, Neoliberalism & Why Healthcare Is Being Privatized

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On January 23, 2023

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Back in the early 2000s I remember reading an interview with Ted Turner, who founded CNN and later sold it. He wasn’t happy with how it was being run so the reporter asked him why he didn’t buy it back.

He explained that he had only a few billion dollars, which meant he wasn’t “in the game” anymore. People mocked him for it, since to a normal person that’s more money than they could ever use, but he was right. He had sold, and now he couldn’t re-buy; prices for key assets like CNN had gone up.

This the basic issue the real players, the mega-rich and the CEOs who run the big companies face. The amount of money that was enough last year isn’t enough this year, let alone in five years. Fall behind and soon you’re out of the game. This doesn’t have to be personal money, just money you control, so if you have effective management control of a company you don’t have ownership control of, you’re in the game, though such people generally reward themselves massively, so they at least aren’t embarassed in front of their peers.

Different oligarchs are competing against each other and so are different groups: tech, finance, manufacturing, military-industrial, etc…  If one gets enough of an advantage, then they buy out the others, and even if you’re still filthy rich, you’re out of the game and nowhere near as powerful as those still in the game.

As everyone knows now, the rich have been taking more and more of pie. The most famous chart is the labor productivity vs. wages one:

Furthermore, the real players have been narrowing: there are fewer and fewer people who are really in the game. Vast waves of consolidation in almost every industry have created oligopolies and monopolies, because those sorts of businesses can squeeze customers. Some games are easier to squeeze than others: healthcare is a famous example as people will pay almost anything to live. There’s a reason Bill Gates is buying up all the farmland he can get, too, with environmental disaster onrushing, he knows that those who control food will (with enough political cover) also clean up.

But at the end of the day, everyone is taking from the same pool: any increase in wealth that doesn’t come from productivity increases has to come from someone else. The rich do take from each other, though they play by the rule that unless you’ve betrayed other elites  you get to stay wealthy, but most of what they take still has to come from the masses.

Unfortunately they’ve been squeezing the masses for 40 to 50 years, maybe a little more. So they have to keep finding new places to squeeze. This is why power has been privatized and de-regulated; why water and sewage is privatized in the UK (and sewage is in the rivers again), and so on.

But in those countries with public health systems (aka. not the US) like Canada and the UK, well, that’s a place where the full squeeze hasn’t been put on. Prices can easily be raised, by moving to the profit maximizing price (insulin at $800, like in the US, and so on), though it means a lot of people will suffer and die.

There’s one last big public heifer to be taken down and consumed, in other words. And if you don’t get in on it, well, your rivals will and they’ll be richer than you, and you stand a good chance of being forced out of the game.

So, with a few exceptions (manufacturing used to be one of them), the elite consensus is to privatize health care. It’s a big cow, sitting there waiting to be chopped up, and if you get a big enough chunk you may be able to buy out some rivals or at least stay in the game.

And in some cases it’s pretty much the last one. In the UK, it’s the only thing of worth the government owns which it hasn’t privatized. So, as everyone understands by now, you deliberately underfund and sabotage it, then call in the private sector because it isn’t working well. The same thing is happening in multiple Canadian provinces, including where I live in Ontario.

And the real players will become fewer and fewer, and if it means that you die or suffer, well, that’s a price the players are willing to pay so they can stay in the game.

As the game narrows, the players will also turn even more on each other. This has already happened with the TransAtlantic elite, who used to more or less cooperate: the US is now feasting on Europe. But then the Germans had been feeding on much of the rest of Europe already. And it’s obvious that Chinese and US elites are moving to a confrontation, and this is driven in great part by the refusal of the CCP to allow anything important in their economy to be controlled by foreigners.

Sadly, there is a real economy, and it is being fantastically mismanaged, not least by allowing the real carrying capacity of the world to collapse. Elites had such a huge pie (to change metaphors) that it usually made more sense to fight over it than to cooperate to grow it more. So we’re at the beginning stages of collapse. There will come a time when the pie starts to shrink in ways no one can deny.

The silver lining, such as it is, is that so much will have been privatized and screwed up that when we finally do get serious about change, assuming we avoid a Dark Age (not a sure thing) we will be able to do things differently, since there will be so little legacy left.

It’s not much of a silver lining, but destruction does make change possible.

 

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Imagine A World Where Violence Or Need Are Impossible

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On December 16, 2022

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There are two main types of coercion in the world.

The first is violence. If you don’t do what someone else wants, they will do something physical to you.

So, imagine if that was impossible. Imagine that if you chose no physical object could affect you. Bullets don’t work, fists don’t work, no one can grab you or put you in handcuffs, and that’s true of everyone.

What would change about society if this were true? What would change about how individuals act?

The second is need. What if you didn’t need to eat or drink and you cold and heat didn’t bother you or harm you and you didn’t get sick? You might still want shelter or a home or objects like books or computers, and objects like cosmetics would exist, but not medicine. But you would need nothing.

(This is half the conception of a pagan God: they can be harmed, even killed, but they don’t need anything. Except they can also, usually, create what they need without other Gods or people.)

Banquet of the Gods by Jacques de Gheyn II

What would you be like, and what would the world be like if you; if people, didn’t need anything?

These are serious questions. Think about them.

Now, question 3 is what if both of these things were true?

These questions matter because they tell you what you put up with because of need and fear. They tell you what other people; what society does that it couldn’t do if people weren’t, in effect, vulnerable.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating. Alas, I’m neither God nor Beast.)

It’s also important to do them separately. The first is about violence, in effect, and that’s not the same as the human need for cooperation, which is much (but not all) of what the second question is about.

This is what what Donne was getting at with “no man is an island.” It is also what is related to Aristotle’s observation “But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god…”

There are things I want to say about these questions, but I’m not going to do so in this article. Instead I want you to think about them. Think about them in general and in particular: think about what you would and wouldn’t do in these three cases.

 

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