Struggling with worldviews
Last night, I was hanging out with some friends. One of my friends is a very intelligent, but in my now-opinon, cynical conservative. He was arguing last night that he believed that people are only motivated by money in their career: "It is human nature". He was also arguing that cancer would be cured except that researchers, with their system of grant moneys, would never really want to work themselves out of a job. This job security is therefore the reason we lack a cure for cancer. He then used a sample size of one (pet peeve!!) to bolster his case that some dude in some college somewhere did this... therefore everyone does that.
I have several issues with this stance.
Firstly, I think it is more reflective of his own personal motivations. Yet, in my opinion, I feel that he truly believes, like so many people, that his motivations are indeed Human Nature, when in fact, those motivations are only his nature.
This colours the conservative worldview and really paints an interesting picture to me. It is a blindness due to ideology. Because, the way I see it, the conservative economic/capitalist doctrine is founded on principals of human nature that simply aren't true. This would be one of those. Others include "rational self-interest", fungible capital/labour, sustained growth, and taxes as a source of economic drain.
Examples I posed as holes in this argument were the following:
- Musicians
- Actual scientific researchers
- People who work in non-profits
Conservatives want you believe that it is rational to leave your city, community, county, state, or country to seek out the lowest tax rates; I personally don't want to live in places with no social services. I like not having to account for my sidewalk miles and not have to pay into a daily fund to cross a bridge; take it out of my taxes and call it good.
Conservatives want to believe that capitalism determines where resources and labour flow. I would argue that sociology has a much larger role. For example, I'm considering relocating to Europe in the next few years. That is not a 'rational economic decision' (nor is his having a child or my having a pet, for that matter). My reasons for moving are social and educational (and weather-related). I want to explore, I want a different experience, and I want socialised medicine.
Labour is not a fungible commodity as capitalism likes to think. You have hundreds of barriers to equality in labour: education, socialisation, family, language are the major factors. Yet free-trade proponents continue on their world-plundering path... and then complain about immigration due to their policies (my friend, though, is not this stupid: I am pretty sure he recognises that immigration pressures are exactly a result of his economic doctrine).
Additionally, capitalists ignore externalities and the Tragedy of the Commons because they carve up the world into distinct entities and their model fails to see the big picture. There is no 'rational' economic value on the upper Ganges glacier, but it has real economic and social impacts. There is no economic value to not having hurricanes and cyclones, but those have a very real economic and social impact when they happen. There is no economic value to keeping icebergs frozen, but there is a very real economic and social impact when they melt (has anyone heard of the Maldives?).
The conservative/capitalist worldview works really well when you isolate it to very controlled situations. But the problem is, the world is much more complex than that, and we have a lot bigger problems to solve as a society and a globe. Capitalism is proving itself to not be a solution, but instead a large part of the problem. It makes me sad when perfectly intelligent people conflate their cynical worldview and limited economic model with Human Nature. Because it is not.
When we all work independently, we are all worse off for it. Does that mean I want a centralised world government telling me what to do? No. But does that mean I may be able to sacrifice certain, especially trivial, liberties to make society a better place? Yes.
Yesterday, I listened to a couple of Radiolab podcasts that also directly contradicted this worldview. I would like to share them...
There was this one that had to do with the perceived 'tyranny' of the railroads 'exerting' their 'time' on the good people of Sandusky, OH. In the late 1800s, the railroads' schedules necessitated a reason to coordinate clocks, and eventually time zones were born, although technically, this made everyone's local time incorrect. For example, if the sun was at the noon position, the clock said 11:40 according to the railroad clocks. People actually resisted coordinated clocks and held protests over this issue. In hindsight, I find this to be childish and to be one more of those idiotic conservative movements. Nowadays, my cell phone clock and yours are perfectly in synch; and we're both better off for it. (time)
Another one was a follow-up to their show "Good". Many people have this fractured, dystopian notion that the natural world is a cut-throat, capitalist-like, hellish place where it is every man for himself and dog eat dog. Vampire bats, yes VAMPIRE BATS, were studied and proved this notion wrong. Of course, this is just a sample of two, so don't take this as the gospel. But the point I'm making is that sharing is something common in social species across the world, and it isn't just for one's own personal game. The world isn't necessarily a take-take-take place; giving up tiny individual freedoms for the greater good is not only a model we could learn from, but it is an ideal and a model that is currently in use in the world around us. (bats!)
I, for the record, don't think that people are only motivated by money. There are too many examples that money is simply a made-up construct and that thousands of things in our lives are more important than money. Yet another example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index
I did an analysis, by the way, of happiness versus per-capita income and happiness versus tax rates. There is no clear trend, and therefore the data doesn't support my friend's conclusion that money is the driver for people. Because, I think it is a fair assumption, that happiness is a driver for people, and if money were a primary driver, then money and happiness would corrolate, and they don't.