Toward a Rational Society: Part I - First Principles

I passed by a picket-line yesterday on my way to work. It was after 3:00, so my guess is they’d been at it for quite some time. The picketers were construction workers, protesting their employer’s failure to provide a living wage and the benefits that families need. I don’t know what management’s side of the argument is, but frankly it doesn’t concern me. It’s not that I think their argument couldn’t be valid. On the contrary, both sides likely have decent points. But I’m walking to work at 3:00 in the afternoon, because, at 26 years old, I’m working retail, since all I’ve done is graduate cum laude with a BA in political science and a medal from the National Political Science Honor Society and, in my own small way, helped elect a man President by handing him an important victory in the longest primary battle in American history and I’m performing a quantitative analysis of the presidency since 1953 to determine was qualities are reliable indicators of a given president’s future use of executive privilege for an article I’m writing, so, of course, I work in retail.

Much of all this is the result of a precipitous economic collapse that began more than a year ago and has only in the last few months begun to pick up steam, a crisis largely precipitated by a demand for higher profits. This constant demand for more from nothing has only succeeded in showing that people learned nothing from the Roaring Twenties, the S&L scandal of the 1980s and the Dot-Com bubble of the late 1990s. What should everyone have learned? Growth based on nothing is bad. Unsustainable growth is tantamount to collapse.

An awful lot of energy has been pointlessly thrown away on the incessant sniping dubbed the Culture War. Back-and-forth shouting matches over what is right and what is wrong have been wasting precious hours of everyone’s time. Accusations of moral relativism fly from the Right and of bigotry and hypocrisy are thrown from the Left and all the while things get worse and nothing is done. But in fact this argument is not so difficult as it is made out to be. Want to find out what’s good and what’s bad? The difference between right and wrong? It starts by thinking.

What are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’? That’s actually the easy part. If the results of an act are good, then the act was right. If the results are bad, then the act was wrong. But this begs the question: what counts as good and bad? This isn’t actually as difficult as it sounds either. I’ll start with the bad, since that’s generally easier to see. Now, Plato said that to determine what is just for a city, think about what is just in a man and see if that can be extrapolated, so using the same principle, what is the worst thing that can happen to a person? The obvious response is death, but is it true? Is death the absolute worst; the lowest of the low? Don’t some people wish for death? The concept of the mercy killing exists for a reason, right? So what is worse than death? What is it someone tries to prevent by putting a man out of his misery? Misery. To die in misery; to perish. So the best thing that can happen to a person must be the opposite. So what lies opposite perishing? Not life. If death wasn’t far enough down, life can’t be far enough up. There must be something higher. Thriving. That gives me the extremes, but there are varying degrees of good and bad. Not every bad thing that happens to me causes me to perish, nor does every good thing cause me to thrive. The dictionary defines thriving as “to grow or develop vigorously.” So before thriving there is growth. Before perishing there is decline. Thrive, grow, decline, perish. I’m still missing an element, though, between growth and decline, a state in which things do not get worse and do not get better but simply continue. Life. Living is the neutral state, the cruising altitude. Thrive, grow, live, decline, perish. So, a right act is one that results in growth, a wrong act is one that results in decline. Can I extrapolate this from an individual to a city, as Plato did? I think so.