Traditionally, the cause of suffering is ascribed to various 'deadly sins,' like wrath, sloth, pride, gluttony, lust, greed and envy. However, this isn't truly accurate. Most suffering on Earth isn't due to the failings or weaknesses of an individual, but is the result of things that normally are good for a person going haywire.
For instance, it's only normal to grow to hate things that bring pain to us, or love things that make us happy. This is in contrast to an orderly, objective view of the universe that will like or dislike things regardless of how they personally affect us. Delusions born from this subjectivist mistake don't fall under any 'sin' described in the past, but cause huge amounts of harm in the modern world.
Another example of suffering brought about through no traditionally recognized human failing is the insistence on justice or karma to be done. There is an evolved instinct that runs as far back as monkeys saying that bad deeds should be punished and good deeds should be rewarded. These feelings are easily hijacked into muddled thinking, and the instinct is so strong that it overpowers all other logical barriers in a flash.
For instance, instead of looking at a person's productivity and paying them accordingly, we pay them on the basis of how much effort they put into their work. This is the root of the 'hourly wage' system which is obviously silly. If one person is twice as productive as someone else, he should be paid twice as much, even if they both worked for an hour. A reverse example of this would be refusing to give any money to an unemployed person, because he hasn't put any effort into earning the money. This is regardless of the fact that he can't get a job because he has zero productivity to offer. Instead of looking at the objective circumstances, everyone reduces the formula to a simpler 'karmic' formula where people are punished for not putting in effort and rewarded for putting in effort. If one person learns on his own how to perform effective surgeries instead of going through the normal college system, (for instance the study showing that with a two hour tutorial, video gamers can guide machines to perform surgeries more effectively than trained doctors who have worked with the machines for years), he isn't rewarded with the job, but is in fact banned from it via a license monopoly system, simply because he didn't suffer enough and put in enough effort to deserve the salary of a surgeon.
This sort of thinking branches out in all directions. Kids are in fact doing the most important work in the world -- creating adults. However, they are given no credit for this labor because it is effortless. In fact, kids enjoy growing up. It doesn't matter that they learn language faster than adults who work hard trying to learn language do, they are given zero credit for this activity while adults who learn via effort are given all sorts of praise and job openings. Because kids learn best via play and socializing, things adults wish they could be doing but don't have the time for, they are given no credit for the actual productivity of these tasks in becoming more productive, intelligent, ethical people in the future. The result is the school system. Various arguments are made about how school is necessary to train people for future jobs, but everyone knows this is a lie because school teaches subjects that no job realistically requires you know anything about, and everyone is required to take courses on math and science when only a tiny few people actually get jobs in these fields in the long run. If school were in fact a day care facility, it would have no problem letting the boys play sports in the fields and girls to chat all day, so it can't be that either. School is simply an implement of karmic justice. Parents resent their children for being able to live lazily without having to work, getting free food and rent and electricity while they have to pay for it all. To take out this resentment on their children, they force the children to work at least as hard if not harder than they themselves do. When the children are properly putting in effort to get by in life, then and only then do they feel it is just that they can receive all of these free goodies from their parents.
In other words, school is specifically a torture chamber designed to be as painful as possible, because if it weren't painful it wouldn't serve the purpose it was designed for, to make kids' lives as difficult as their parents'. This despite the fact that children are weaker than adults in so many ways that school afflicts them far more harshly than work afflicts an adult, and despite the fact that children have no support network of lovers or friends because they were born alone into this world, whereas parents by definition always have someone they can come home to. It doesn't matter to adults. All they see is the parasitical children laughing happily while eating free food and they fall into a blind rage.
This thirst for karmic justice blindly assaults the poor as well. Why are we giving handouts to the poor? They should have to put in as much effort as we do! Shouts the comfortably middle class. However, if a poor person got a job, he would be paid around 1/8 as much as a middle class person, even working the same hours. In addition, his job would be more physically strenuous and mentally monotonous, and therefore he would be putting in more effort for 1/8 as much money than the normal person seeking 'karmic justice.' This thirst for justice doesn't care -- it just wants poor people to work, regardless of the radically different cost-benefit ratio.
Poor people are not inherently bad. In the past, they were farmers who all worked their own fields in order to provide for themselves. In a similar event in history, it slowly became apparent to the nobility of England that they would make more money grazing sheep on England's soil and selling the wool to Europe than letting their peasants farm the land for self-subsistence wheat crops. They evicted the peasants from the land, uprooted the farms, and let sheep graze the resulting grass. These peasants were then unemployed and ended up beggars or thieves in the streets of London. These poor people, who had previously been self-sufficient, were then seen as full of moral ineptitude, a scourge upon the land, subhuman scum, and treated by the comfortably middle class like a pest to be eradicated. According to some studies the peasant population of England simply died out, with only the sons of nobility surviving into the future. In any case, we have plenty of proof that London had hangings in the hundreds for every minor offense, to the point that just being poor was in itself a hanging offense in ancient England.
Today, in the modern era, the same thing has occurred, and we are looking at the same response in the moral climate. America's population has expanded by 31 million people since 2000, but we still have fewer jobs today than we had then. Most of these new jobs pay less than the jobs that were available in 2000. They are temp jobs with no health care benefits, pensions, etc. This new class of unemployed people is not due to a massive rise in 'sloth' or 'laziness' or any other Republican dream. It is due to productivity increases inherent in the adoption of global free trade and automation. People whose work used to be productive and self-sufficient are now redundant, and they have nowhere to go in an economy that has absolutely no use for them, and hasn't had any use for these additional laborers for over a decade. This is not a recession any more. 31 million additional people, but fewer jobs than we had 13 years ago, isn't a temporary economic hiccup -- it's a permanent new reality.
It is inconceivable that the 50 million people on food stamps in America today all, spontaneously, decided to be lazy together in a massive conspiracy. Rewards for laziness have actually gone down in America. Welfare is less plentiful and more limited than before. These people didn't want to become poor and unemployed, they were forced into this situation against their will, and they have found no way out of it for the last thirteen years. Therefore, insisting on karmic justice against these poor unfortunate souls is ruthless madness. Saying that those who do not work should not eat is condemning 50 million innocent people to death, a worse death toll than Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. You would create a new famine even worse than the Holodomor that stalked the Ukraine. Any lesser version of this ruthless feeling is just as unjust as its purest and fullest expression. Saying that people who do not work shouldn't have air conditioning, for instance, or computers, or any other basic commodity that makes for a happy life -- like a wife or children, is equally cruel. Denying them any of these things on the basis that they aren't productive is unfairly cruel and based only on a primitive instinct to not reward people who don't put effort into things, not based on them having actually done anything wrong in their lives.
People's IQ scores are basically fixed at birth. If they are incapable of learning the material necessary to enter your 'information economy,' if they can't become computer programmers or rocket scientists like you want them to be, it is through no moral fault of their own. Since all lower level work can already be done by cheap labor overseas or pre-programmed machines, a huge number of Americans simply have no economic role in the modern economy. They are just like the British peasants whose labor was worth less than grazing sheep. But we don't have to be just like the English nobility who rounded them up, tore down their homes, and hung them in endless gallows as a result. We can understand their humanity and forgive them for a sin they didn't even commit and had no hand in making the case.
Let's start with a basic fact about the American economy. The top 15% of Americans earn over 50% of America's income. Since the recession began, this gap between the rich and the poor has only widened. As automation continues to improve, the gap will only grow larger and larger. This fact of nature can only be reversed by force, there is no natural arresting feedback that would level our economic fortunes back into equality again. This means that even if half of all Americans didn't work at all, our per capita GDP would only lower from $47,000 a year down to $24,000 a year. $24,000 per capita is the same as having $92,000 a year for a family of 4, obviously enough to live richly and comfortably in every way. IE, poor people by not working are doing no measurable harm to anyone else, even if they live comfortably with your tax money on the side. Never mind an even distribution, if poor people who didn't work received just $12,000 a year, they would put virtually no dent in the size of other people's incomes at all. Furthermore, it isn't middle class people earning $50,000 a year paying the taxes for these indigent poor, it is the super rich who earn billions every year, who seriously can't feel any difference whether they earn one million or ten million due to tax rates. There is no actual harm being done to taxpayers by the unemployed, it is all imaginary. It is all based on a primitive simian instinct that simply hates, for no concrete reason, anyone who isn't putting effort into getting the good stuff in life.
I have to question whether people who do work would even want to quit if they had the choice. People with jobs in Apple or Google, do they really go to work for the money? Aside from basic living necessities, I believe most people work because they enjoy it. They enjoy being productive, they enjoy being around their colleagues, and they enjoy the admiration people have for them due to their ability to create good things. Since poor people who don't work can only hurt people's paychecks, and have no influence on the others goods that accrue due to working, there is an even more flimsy connection between 'indigent people' doing harm to the 'hard-working good people of America.' Rather than hating the poor for not working while you 'have to go to work every day,' isn't it more that you should pity people who aren't productive enough to work at anything useful, whereas you have a talent that is admired and esteemed every day? Who is really in the worse position here?
When people suffer, they generally find it too difficult to eliminate the source of their suffering. Perhaps they are ill and it has no cure, or they must continue working at a job they hate for a living. Rather than trying to change society into one that has free health care and a minimum income for everyone in America, they spitefully turn around and try to make sure that at least someone else is suffering worse than they are. Strangely enough, the easiest relief for suffering isn't curing yourself, it's plaguing someone else. The boss belittles the department head, the department head belittles the salaryman, who goes home and belittles his wife, who belittles her bratty son, who kicks the dog. The dog then bites the mailman. The chain of hate and vengeance continues forever, spirals of pain going in all directions and racing across invisible threads connecting every American to every other American in a cycle of mutual destruction. One of the easiest (because they are the weakest) targets of hatred, vengeance, and suffering is the poor. Another is children. Disguised behind this desire for 'karmic justice,' 'those who do not work should not eat,' is in fact a far uglier feeling that so long as I'm making someone else suffer worse than me, I can always feel better about myself and my condition. At least I'm not them. One of the early Christian theorists believed that one of the pleasures of Heaven was looking down from the clouds at the people burning in Hell and mocking them for their suffering while they sat sipping margaritas. This is a very clear sighted rendition of the human psyche, but it is not a good part of the human psyche. Whether you say it openly, "I feel better when others around me are worse off than I am," "I can distract myself from my own pain by making someone else suffer even more than me and gaze upon their humiliation," or whether you hide it via claims to righteous justice and a desire for karma, it's all the same emotion. You are punishing innocent people who never did you harm, just because you can, and aren't improving your life or theirs in any way as a result of said punishments.
More than all 7 deadly sins, more people in the world today are suffering due to others' desire to hurt them. Rather than any personal failing people have control over, like whether they eat too much or get too angry and yell at someone they shouldn't, most people are suffering completely avoidable fates due to the pressure society is putting upon them. They are victims of a heartless system called capitalism and childbirth which innately puts people into positions of inferiority and superiority, and the people running these torture chambers put on saints' halos and blithely say it is 'for their own good' and that these people just need to 'be taught a lesson.' A lesson they can never learn and never escape from, because children are children by their nature, and stupid people are stupid by their nature, and so they must simply suffer for all eternity.
It isn't people who need to change, it's the world. It's society. We have created a monstrous system which is devouring innocent people's souls. It isn't necessary and it isn't virtuous. We could retain the productivity of technology and trade without trampling upon poor people and children who do not fit into this system. But only if we get over this idea of 'karma' or 'justice' being more important than love. Evil that lasts never is nakedly apparent, like lust or envy, because such evil self destructs quickly and is obviously against the very perpetrator of the sin's self-interest. But true evil, scarily powerful evil, always hides itself behind a mask and says it is good. It is almost always in the self-interest of the evil-doer to continue doing it, and the evil has no negative feedback loops so it can expand all the way into infinity. The only way to fight it is to forcefully break the chain of hate and despair from outside, through external intervention -- its internal consistency is flawless and pure. The people caught in the system can do nothing to get out of it -- they can only be freed by people who are already outside the system, just like the slaves were freed from the South by the North or women given the vote by men in the 1920's. It's time for middle class people to wake up and realize their moral duty towards the poor and the powerless, and to free them from their shackles of karmic justice, not because it is in their self-interest to do so, but simply because it is the right thing to do, and only they can do it by voting for benefits to the poor alongside the poor, instead of always voting against them alongside the rich. The rich are rich, I assure you, they can fend for themselves. They're going to be happy one way or the other. But the poor need your help, and you're the only ones who will ever be in a position to give it to them. If slavery was wrong, why is poverty and indigence okay? If taking land away from serfs and giving it to sheep is wrong, why is modern unemployment okay? If Americans would show at least as much compassion as their forefathers did in 1861 or 1965, this endless, jobless recession could have ended in 2007. Six years later, we are still waiting, and the workforce participation rate continues to dwindle. Any day now, middle Americans. Whenever you want to be good, like every generation before you has been. Tick, tock. Tick, tock.
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