Category: Ethics Page 5 of 9

I was reminiscing today about the few actually good people I’ve known.

Two stand out, my friend Peter, who fought for Hitler; and my old teacher and coach Craig Newell.

I had a bad childhood. My parents were alcoholics, and my father was an angry drunk. Then I went to boarding school, and I was not the sort of kid who did well at boarding school, though the one I went to was well-run and preferable to being at home.

I did not come out of this believing in the goodness of humanity or that authority figures could be trusted. It’s one of the reasons I’m a good analyst in our current situation: I assume people with power are basically scum, and that when they aren’t they do the minimum and do it badly, and I’ve usually been right.

(I can also tell who the few good people are, which is why I supported Corbyn and have no time for the people who lied and smeared him.)

The only person in my life who ever proved completely worthy of trust was Craig Newell. The reason is simple: Mr. Newell (as I called him) had a code, and I NEVER saw him break it. Not ever. He never talked about his code, mind you, but I could tell he had one. He didn’t judge hardly at all, and he was never cruel. I literally never saw him be cruel even once. I never even heard of him being cruel and I did hear of his rectitude (in the best sense).

This isn’t something you can conceal in a place like a boarding school. It is not possible.

He didn’t go out of his way to be kind or good or anything, but he didn’t step away from it when the need was obvious. (As he didn’t with me, if that isn’t clear. And I was not a pleasant teenager.)

What I learned as a child is that most people don’t even meet the responsibilities of their positions (husband, wife, teacher, boss, politicians, whatever). A few do their duty, and I honor them for it, because it is rare. But to go beyond that and actually be a man of honor is unbelievably rare.

Still, Mr. Newell wasn’t as good a man as Peter, though he was more trustworthy. Peter went out of his way to be kind. Mr. Newell wasn’t cruel, and didn’t step away from need, but Peter stepped into need and helped.

Those people who see need and help, even if it is only a little, are, again, incredibly rare.

I tend to like people, and dislike humanity. But I don’t trust either.

Still, good people exist, as do honorable ones.

There is a Jewish myth:

Lamedvavnik (Yiddish: לאַמעדוואָווניק‎), is the Yiddish term for one of the 36 humble righteous ones or Tzadikim mentioned in the kabbalah or Jewish mysticism. According to this teaching, at any given time there are at least 36 holy persons in the world who are Tzadikim. These holy people are hidden; i.e., nobody knows who they are. According to some versions of the story, they themselves may not know who they are. For the sake of these 36 hidden saints, God preserves the world even if the rest of humanity has degenerated to the level of total barbarism. This is similar to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Hebrew Bible, where God told Abraham that he would spare the city of Sodom if there was a quorum of at least ten righteous men.

This story largely encompasses how I feel about humanity. Most humans are weak: They aren’t good, bad, or honorable, because they don’t have the strength. It mostly isn’t their (our) fault.

But a few are good, or honorable, and, rarely, both.

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The simplest of maxim in all of ethics is: “I don’t harm others, I don’t harm myself.”

The problem with this ethic arises when someone else hurts you.

What do you do?

Perhaps the first step is to ask them to stop. If they don’t, attempt to move away from them.

If you can’t or if moving away harms you, the next step is violence.

“If you won’t stop hurting me, I’ll have to make you stop.”

In a complex society like ours this becomes complicated. There are people doing harm to you and me right now. Rich people, mostly, and powerful people like politicians and senior corporate officers. They kill people, impoverish people and make people sick for their own benefit. They don’t stop when asked nicely, or even rudely.

They also use a lot of violence to get their way and keep hurting people. I trust this is self-evident. The police and military don’t serve “the people,” except incidentally. Some schmuck who does some drugs goes away for years, while the crooks who brought down the economy and left millions homeless and impoverished because of their fraud and corruption pay a few fines that are less than what they stole.

But, the bottom line is they hurt people and won’t stop when asked, nor can one move away from the hurt they are inflicting. This hurt is likely to kill some billions of people.

So violence is justified. This isn’t a moral/ethical problem, it is a tactical strategic question. It is no longer a question of whether violence is justified against people who are doing great evil and won’t stop when asked, but a question of whether it will work and what is required to make it work.

Let us say you know a catastrophe is coming, and you cannot stop it and thus save everyone.

What do you do?

You start making choices about who to save. Not just their lives, but their stuff and their power.

Catastrophes often lead to changes in societies, but sometimes they don’t.

The 1929 stock market crash, and the Great Depression lead to most of the rich losing their money and power. The end result was that the people running society changed, and that the post-war period was the best to be alive–in the developed world–in history.

This happened because Hoover and FDR did not believe in bailing out the rich, and FDR instituted the New Deal and 90 percent + marginal tax rates.

But while FDR didn’t think the rich should be protected, he did institute deposit protection for ordinary people. If you weren’t rich, you were covered.

The 2007/8 crash led to no such thing, because the priority was saving the rich. Obama, Bernanke, and Geithner went out of their way not just to keep the rich, rich, but to hurt ordinary people if necessary to do so. They deliberately hurt householders, when necessary, to help banks. (See David Dayen’s “Chain of Title” for all the grizzly details.)

Now, this is not to say that Treasury and the Fed should have just done nothing, like in 1929 (though if they had just followed the laws that were put in place after 1929, we would, in fact, be better off).

It is to say they chose to save rich people and not help most other people.

So the catastrophe led to a resumption of the status quo.

Except that it didn’t. It kicked the economy into shit-mode, and the result was Trump/Brexit and the general rise of the right. (Because all the major central banks and governments bailed out the rich and fucked everyone else.)

So, catastrophes happen, and a choice is made about who to protect and exalt, and that choice has consequences down the line.

(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.)

Climate change will be no different. Who is protected (or survives through their own efforts) matters, because it determines who will be powerful later.

It is thus important not just to save people you like, but to make sure that bad actors like bankers and the current political elite are not saved: They must lose their money and power (and if that means they lose their lives you should be okay with that, because they sure don’t care if ordinary people lose theirs).

This is ethical, because who runs society, and for whom, determines how good the society is. When society was truly run for the majority, with the intention to spread the wealth, society was good (and where it was bad, as with minorities, it is because the wealth was not spread).

A society is good if it tries to take care of everyone and tamps down inequality, allowing only moderate inequality. (Does anyone really need to earn more than 20x the median income?)

In the days to come, we will have to make choices about who to protect and who to save. Remember that it’s worth taking some time out to choose who doesn’t keep their stuff, their power and, yeah, even their lives.

If this bothers you, remember that they are deciding if you live and die, and their record shows that they either don’t care if you die, or that they actively want you to.

We are moving into some very bad times. Whether society is good or bad afterwards will be determined by who takes power during catastrophe, and who loses power during catastrophe.

It can be us, or it can be a small elite who cares only about themselves.

Choose.

… is whether or not someone will argue against their interest.

If you are rich, do you ever argue for high taxes, perhaps? If you are a home owner, do you argue for policies which even the field with renting? If you have a job doing something harmful, do you argue that job shouldn’t exist or be changed to something less harmful.

People who always argue their interest are have no integrity and should not be listened to in public debates.

Of course interest has to be understood properly. One may be in a social group where arguing against apparent interest isn’t actually that. In certain left-wing circles arguing against women’s rights isn’t really against interest, because you’d be a pariah. And there is a reason why women married to right wing men, vote right wing: it’s not actually against their interest.

(These examples don’t mean I approve, they’re just examples.)

A lot of apparent insanity comes from people arguing what their social group believes, even if it’s against hard interest. It’s not in young right wing men’s interest to support climate change denial, but it’s part of what their ideology and group believes, so they do. Incels have some beliefs that make it less likely they’ll get laid or find love with a woman, but, again, changing those beliefs (or at least arguing from them) would leave them ostracized from their group.

A person with integrity has principles, and applies those principles. If one believes all people should be treated with dignity, for example, one might support another group’s rights even if that’s against one’s own interest and even if member’s of one’s own group would be angered by the stand.

Integrity.

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.