Getting benefits from a community requires some personal sacrifices

By | World

(Excerpt from Mindfuck Monday 17 Aug 2020 by Mark Manson)

Basically: living in a community has benefits, but those benefits require that each individual makes sacrifices. Politics is then the discussion of these individual sacrifices and whether they are worth it for everybody or not. Because this is a constant tension, politics is an infinite game, unwinnable and perpetual, defining and redefining the terms of our coexistence one bullshit, bloated piece of legislation at a time.

In this arrangement, left-wingers tend to be more concerned with the distribution of benefits from everybody’s sacrifice. Lefties want to make sure that no one is getting completely hosed. Therefore, lefties tend to believe that making more individual sacrifices is worth it if it means the benefits become more evenly distributed throughout society.

Right-wingers, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with individuals giving up as little as possible. They intuitively recognize that, at some point, if you’re giving up so much to the collective, then it stops being worth it. Therefore, righties tend to believe that an imperfect system is worth it if it means guaranteeing individual liberty.

We need both of these dispositions, of course. We need people checking to make sure our benefits are getting distributed fairly. We also need people checking to make sure that individuals aren’t being asked to give up too much.

The problem is when entitlement comes in. It corrupts both of these attitudes.

The entitled left-wing attitude is the belief that no inequality should exist anywhere—that everyone should receive the exact same benefits at all times. This is unreasonable because people are simply different. They have different talents, experiences, histories, and beliefs about the world. Therefore, different outcomes will be natural and expected.

The entitled right-wing attitude is the belief that no individual freedom should ever be given up anywhere—that as long as I’m not overtly hurting somebody else, I should be free to do whatever the fuck I want. This is also unreasonable. Our actions affect each other indirectly and often in subtle and surprising ways. This could be something as complex as climate change or some other Tragedy of the Commons scenario. It could also be something as simple as being asked to wear a mask.

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