Responsibilities and Freedoms

If you have the responsibility to do something, then you obviously do not have the freedom to 'not' do it. That should go without saying.

That’s the underlying definition of responsibility. It’s not optional, it cannot be avoided.

We, of course, should try to minimize the number of intrinsic responsibilities in a society for the average person. That would be a good thing, we don’t want to overburden people. But because we are a collective group, there are always some inherent responsibilities. They are unavoidable.

It’s rather obvious that not traumatically interfering with other people’s lives is a core responsibility. Obviously, murder and theft are well known and well understood. But just walking around and pushing other people out of the way is not allowed either. 

So, it’s no surprise that infecting other people on purpose with a virus is considered wrong as well. Thus, there is a basic and inherent responsibility that all people should do whatever is necessary to not go around infecting others with diseases that they currently have. If the state of the art for avoiding doing this is isolation, masks, and vaccines, and these have been shown to be effective, then the responsibility is clear.

And to make it a little more difficult, if, for some people, it is impossible to know if they have the virus or not, and if the virus is also quite common, then pretty much everyone has an inherent responsibility to assume they might have it and then do their absolute best in not passing it around to others.

It would be nice if everyone knew this and obeyed it instinctively, but rather sadly in some societies, large swaths of the population are confused about their responsibilities as its members. Thus, we see that it has become necessary to remind them of their responsibilities to the others around them, through legal means, rather than just letting them figure it out on their own. It would have been way better if only a tiny fraction of people had forgotten or ignored their responsibilities, but when it is more than just a single-digit percentage point, governments are obligated to intervene in order to prevent large-scale disasters.

Diversity and Control

A very simple way to look at many of our world's problems is in terms of 'control'. There are plenty of people out there that want to control others. Some people allow this, but often many do not. When control issue arise, both sides feel justifed in their agenda, both put significant effort into the brewing conflict.

Sometimes control issues are justified. We live in large collective groups for which we need to abide by a common set of principle and rules. This benefits all of us, but not everyone realizes it. So we'll always need to have people in a controlling position to enforce the rules and deal with those who go against them. It is easy to understand that for an issue like 'murder' this is a very good thing. 

Sometimes control issues are are problematic. Some people think that things would get better if they personally had even more control. If they could just control the little things, keep all of the people in line, then our world would be a happier place. 

One of the most interesting things about 'opinions' is you can pretty much count on someone, somewhere, to have any possible opinion. Some opinions are more reasonable than others, but all of the possibilites are held by at least one person. Not only that, but pretty much most of the combinations of opinions, whether they clash or not, are also held by someone. 

This relates back to control, because it means that pretty much for any level of control, someone out there believes it is reasonable, but there is also at least one person out there that does not. As the lines of control constantly shift in our societies, there are always at least two groups that are activily engaged in that process. One tries to push it further down, the other ties to push it upwards. Both believe that what they are doing is for the benefit of all. Both, relative to their own opinions, believe they are right.

Over the last few decades, due to our realization that our behaviour has a real impact on the world around us, we have closely studied our planet and understood that it is a somewhat volatile place. Our lifespans have been short, so we've mostly lived with the myth that our world is static, unchanging. We used to see things like the little ice age as anomalies, but a closer look has shown that our planet is an ever-changing, and sometimes unfriendly landscape. Coupled with our learning more of our vast history, we have been slowly converging on an understanding that in order to survive in such a volatile environment, our strongest asset is diversity. That is, if we were all identical clones that thought identically, our static nature would make us far more susceptable to the wild mood swings of the planet. If we are diverse, and scattered, then although those changes are devistating, we are able to rebuild and move on. Our diversity is not only a strength, but a necessity of our environment. It's no accident that we all have different opinions, that we see things so differently.

That diversity is a core strength of our species means that to continue we absolutely must preserve it. It isn't optional. But interestingly enough, one of the side-effects of diversity is that someone out there will always have the opinion that diversity is bad, that if they personally had more control they could wipe it out and make the world a better place where everyone behaves identically. So what is necessary for us to adapt to our world is also the seeds of the desire to bring us down. 

As people struggle for control around the world, the diversity issue often gets caught in between. We must preserve our diversity, but in doing so we allow those who don't want it to continue to pursue their agendas. We can't just wipe them out since if we did we'll just be following a variation of their agenda. At times this doesn't seem to make sense, and the world looks to be a crazy place that never gets better, but it's not. Conflicts are inevitable, and both sides will always believe that they are right, but in the backdrop we do gradually expand our knowledge and refine our behaviour. As we continue with those larger trends, we have learned how to expect and preserve our diverse range of thinking, and have hopefully learned less destructive ways of mediating the inevitable conflicts. It might be nicer if we weren't always clashing so hard, but that friction is a byproduct of the paradox from which we were spawned.

I feel guilty. It's been years since I last ranted about the irrational nature of our modern world, yet some readers desperately hang on waiting for a post. I wish I could say that in the interim we've managed to fix the world, correct the injustices and become a rational global society so there is nothing left to write about, but that's pretty much the opposite of what has happened. Rather, bad economics saw us slip a little farther down the notch of insanity, while most of us tried to hide from the madness. As a species we seem to pride ourselves as being "intelligent" but then we go off and do the stupidest things. We may know more than our ancestors, but we seem incapable of applying that knowledge collectively to better our lives, our planet or even ourselves. We keep buying into that next vile of cheap snake oil in the hopes that "this time it really will cure us" without every really considering that our problems are always caused by 'buying snake oil'. You'd think at some point we'd learn, but I suspect we'll just keep doing this over and over again until we can't or we hit some major turning point. Either is as likely at this point.

I don't feel guilty anymore : -)