[FRIAM] "All [persons] are created equal"

Sat Aug 28 12:56:09 EDT 2021

Yes but …. Merle …. Beware the sin of Liberal Guilt : “You grant me my privilege, and in return I grant you my guilt”  Unless that guilt finds its way into action, it is sinful to indulge in it.  My proposal for “action” is support for vigorous redistributive taxation.  By the way, you libertarians can agree with me, can’t you, if the money is just given away  rather than used to support well-meaning government programs?

N

Nick Thompson

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Saturday, August 28, 2021 11:40 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "All [persons] are created equal"

Coming from different perspectives (missing: our interrelationship with nature) hasn't ultimately offered us a good future, as well as an inability to avoid war and addiction to weapons of mass destruction (including global warming).  I suggest that a new perspective for someone like Eric might be looking around at his extraordinarily privileged life (his life defies the human condition) and finding some way to express gratitude and remorse deep within.    

On Sat, Aug 28, 2021 at 8:05 AM Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> > wrote:

" All persons would be created equally .. in a perfect world."

Hard disagree. Perhaps in a perfect we would reduce the extreme inequities a bit, but it would be a much less perfect world if we created actual full equality. This is part of my long-standing disagreement with Nick's attempts to flat-world inheritance. 

We are in a BETTER world because people had a variety of experiences growing up. Some had a new bike magically appear for them one day. Some sold lemonade all summer and got one themselves. Some never got the new bike they wanted at all. Some never even got a used bike. Some were punched and had their bikes stolen. I'm not talking about watching a sibling literally starve to death... but I am talking about a broad range of unequal personal and social starting places. We are a better world because people live very different lives, pursuing very different goals, informed by different experiences, and thereby coming at problems from very different perspectives. 

"All people are created equal" is a claim about how we have socially agreed to treat people as if they were "endowed by their creator" with certain basic rights. Those are what is now called "negative rights", rights not to have others interfere with you in certain ways. But in a grand sense, people are not equal, and we wouldn't want them to be; it would be disastrous if they were. 

As tempting as it is to arrogantly declare that the world would be a better place if it everyone was just like me... I also know that's not true. There is no individual for which it is true, not even one as amazing as I, and not even one as amazing as you. 

On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 9:00 PM Sarbajit Roy <sroy.mb at gmail.com <mailto:sroy.mb at gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick, 

I am not a metaphysicist to debate such things with you. Can just state cold facts.

All persons would be created equally .. in a perfect world.

However, when the world they are born into is imbalanced, in actuality their weightage depends on the circumstances of their birth and the larger society(s) they are born into

Attempts, by poiticians. to change that imbalance invariably create a cure worse worse than the disease .. killing sparrows in China or introducing rabbts to Australia. For instance, the reverse discrimination presently practised in India against Brahmins has been taken to extraordinary lengths by "vote bank" politics

Brahmins students are not eligible (barred in law) to apply for 87% of seats in engineering or medical colleges in India.

They must openly compete with the entire population of applicants for the remaining 13% of seats

To get admission into a top engineering college, a Brahmin student must get at least 72 out of 90 multiple choice questions correct in what is acknowledged to be one of the world's toughest entrance exams, whereas a reserved category student can get in even after getting all 90 questions wrong.

So if I look at it dispassionately, the problem with gaining true equality is politics and politicians. The misguided attemptsof the USA to promote / inmpose "democracy" and "equality" in third world countries inevitably results in the installation of dictatorships or puppets fronting for miltary regimes as a reaction. Afghanistan is a good example of it.

Sarbajit

On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 1:34 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Sarbajit, 

If I understand the shape of the globe correctly, you are waking up pretty soon, and I would like to pick up the conversation about caste, if you don’t mind.    

I believe the proposition in the subject line.  Given the many ways that proposition can be understood as plainly false, I feel that my belief in it must be defended. 

In what sense equal?  Not in genes.  Not in uterine environment. .  Not in early nutrition and cognitive stimulation. Not in social capitol. Not in financial capitol.  Not in access to health care.  Not in exposure to future parasites.  Not in almost anything that I can think of.   So, why is the aphorism not just nonsense.

I find, that if I examine my thinking in this matter, a very primitive metaphysics about the moment of an individual’s creation.  What follows is flagrantly silly, but here it is.   On my account, at the moment of birth a soul is taken out of storage and assigned to a body.  By “person” in the aphorism, I mean the combination of a particular soul with the particular body.  These assignments are at random.  So, for good or ill, no soul deserves the body it gets.   I cannot claim credit for my genes, my good uterine environment, my social capitol, my financial capitol, my bad hip, the draft deferment it provided, my getting a phd at absolute peak of demand for phd’s, my good education, even my FRIAM membership.  They are all consequences of that initial, random assignment.   Now YOU may credit me in some ways, because knowing that all these advantages have been assigned to me may make me useful or pleasing (or the opposite) in many ways, and that may bring me the advantages of your association.  But ==> I <== do not ==>deserve<== those advantages.  

This odd metaphysics leads me to enormous gratitude for the life I have been allowed to live and great sympathy for rigorous taxation of the advantaged, so that so much a soul’s future is not determined by that moment of assignment. 

I have no idea what happens to this primitive metaphysics if I try to integrate it with my monism.  The religious scholars among you might recognize as some backass weird perversion of Calvinism.  

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org <http://emergentdiplomacy.org> 

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