Author’s foreword:
It is my belief that the average American of less than 40 years is utterly philosophically bankrupt. I’m convinced that this is the result of a concerted effort by American media and education, but this suspicion of mine is beside the point, really; that’s for another time. That said bankruptcy exists is the problem that I am seeking to address here with this series of short treatises optimistically (I tend to be windy) called “Succinctly.”
I seek to address this bankruptcy because philosophy is a vitally important thing for any thinking ape to possess, yet few do.
I argue that my philosophy is true and correct because it all flows from one single objectively true fact; and, that fact is the topic of the first of my Succinctly treatises.
Enjoy!
Kyle A. Lohmeier
Treatise I: Individual Self-Ownership
Every human being owns his or her own body outright.
The above stands alone, unmolested by a semicolon or joined by another sentence within the same paragraph. It does so because it is the first and most basic objective truth on planet Earth and therefore needs no qualification.
It is also the wellspring of a handful of other objective truths.
The first of these is that, since every human owns his or her own body, they then must also own all of the labor their body performs. This is, of course, true. How can anyone else own the labor my body is physically performing? It’s not possible.
If all humans own their own bodies outright and therefore all of the labor their body performs, they too must also own outright, and have sole claim to, all the fruits of that labor.
Suppose I planted a tomato seed in a container on my stoop and over the spring a tomato plant began to grow. I care for and tend to the plant all summer long, mixing with the plant itself my labor and my property in the form of water, fertilizer, etc. Who then owns the nice, ripe tomatoes at the end of the summer? I do, of course. Who else could possibly have any claim to them if no one else helped me grow them?
Using the same hypothetical, suppose half-way through the season I decide I’ve got better things to do than tend to a tomato plant and so offer a neighbor half the tomatoes if he tends to the plant for me. My neighbor agrees to these terms and mixes his labor with the plant for the rest of the summer, at the end of which, I pay him the half of the crop as per our agreement. Who owns my neighbor’s tomatoes? My neighbor does, of course. They were paid to him as compensation for a job I offered him that he voluntarily accepted, no one else has any claim to them.
At no point is anyone else entitled to the fruit of my neighbor’s labor – the basket of tomatoes – the tomatoes were my rightful property that I then voluntarily traded to my neighbor in exchange for a few hours of his labor over the summer. He earned the tomatoes by performing labor with his body, which he owns and is solely his property; as every human being owns their own body outright.
This objective truth has other implications as well. Given that every person owns their own body, it is no one else’s business how they treat it. Every individual is free to dye their hair whatever color they want, shave it all off, or style it however they like; to cover their skin with tattoos, or leave it blank; to carry the fetus inside to term, or to abort it; to fill their bodies with all manner of drugs and alcohol, or be a straightedge teetotaler.
This objective truth also means that there can be no “moral” restriction on what labor a person agrees to perform. If a person wants to sell the body they own as a prostitute, such is obviously their right just as it is the right of a person to sell the body they own as a coal miner, dish washer, or accountant – such is just what follows logically from the objective truth that every human being owns their own body.
And again – the fact every human owns their own body is a universal, objective truth and the basis of all true philosophy.
Treatise II: Rights
If the knowledge of individual self-ownership is the river of all objective truth, then one of its major tributaries is the concept of human rights. Most humans err in their thinking on this topic because they are taught to do so by government and media.
Every human owns his or her body outright – this objective universal truth carries with it undeniable logical implications, many of which were discussed in the first treatise, including the right to own property. That right, like all human rights, exists wholly independent of the political state in which the human happens to live. The error in thinking humans are taught by their state is that it is the state itself that grants humans their rights. The self-serving nature of this lie is rather obvious; of course it is in the state’s interest to tell people only the state can grant humans rights.
We are taught that states do this “legitimately” by having a vaguely democratic government structure that then decides what rights individuals have by a majority vote. We aren’t taught about individual self-ownership in school, but we sure do get an earful of democracy, and “majority rule.” We are never taught to examine the concept of “majority rule,” and for good reason; it’s indistinguishable from mob rule.
It would have been easy to get a majority of Americans to vote in favor of rounding up all Arab-Americans and locking them in an internment camp on September 12, 2001 (and there’s even “legal” precedent!). Does that mean, in this hypothetical, that Arab-Americans who happened to be in the United States on that day suddenly lost their right to individual self-ownership? Of course not, it was just taken away from them by the rule of the mob and by the mob’s enforcers, the government and the police. Painting a veneer of government over monstrous actions doesn’t make them legitimate, it just serves to assuage the guilt those carrying them out – they’re just following orders, the government’s orders, the “will of the people.”
The concept of states being the thing which grants rights to individual humans is simply asinine. Are we really to accept that the state’s goofy rituals of electing congressmen who then haggle and wrangle over self-serving bills – while trying desperately to keep winning reelection so as to never have to get a real job – have the power to grant individual humans rights by writing them down on pieces of paper and putting them in the National Archive? That’s just silly.
Some processed wood pulp harvested from some random box elder and then etched with ink derived from a soybean field somewhere, when ritualistically combined with sufficient utterances of the magic word “aye,” confers upon me a right to, say, carry a handgun outside of my home? Or, that same ritual can be used to deny me the right to keep the property I already own? I already have the right to carry a handgun on my person as an extension of my absolute right to self-defense and property. And it wouldn’t matter what sort of tree the paper was made from, no ritual of men, no law, can legitimately deny me the right to keep my own property.
Every human being owns his or her own body. From this ownership flows the right to own property by mixing their labor with it as discussed previously. Today, when we fight over “rights” we’re typically only ever fighting over extensions of the right to own property or of self-ownership itself.
It’s embarrassing that it was only very recently Americans begrudgingly recognized the right of gay individuals to marry each other when each owns their own body and naturally has the right to voluntarily enter into such a civil contract that marriage functionally is.
It’s also embarrassing that the courts can’t figure out that a person who owns a business, whatever it is, has the right to decide with whom they’re going to voluntarily choose to do business. It’s a terrible business move for a bakery to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, but it is that business owner’s right to do so if they choose.
Every human being owns their own body, as such, no human ever has the right to initiate violence upon another (regardless of the costume they’re wearing). The only legitimate use of violence is in self-defense against such aggression. As an extension of a human’s ownership of his or her body and property needed to sustain their life, humans have the inherent right to own and employ tools for self-defense, including any and all firearms they can afford.
“Every human” doesn’t just mean American humans and it doesn’t just mean the guns the government lets American humans own now. “Every human” means every human in China has an absolute and undeniable right to own an M-60, .30-caliber general purpose machinegun. That they are prevented from doing so by their state doesn’t mean that they don’t have that right, they absolutely do, it simply means their government takes it away from them via threat of violence.
The state doesn’t create or grant rights, it merely takes them away. All human beings have the exact same set of basic human rights by virtue of being human beings who own their own body, the labor their body performs and all the fruits of that labor.
Treatise III: The Extent of Rights and One’s Legitimate Concerns
Every human being owns his or her own body and the rights that logically arise from this fact are clear, but finite. No one can claim a right that in any way interferes with an individual’s objective right to self-ownership and to own property – not even if a majority of one’s neighbors are in agreement.
It’s popular to assert that all humans have a “right” to food. This then implies that all humans have a right to have someone else gather or otherwise furnish food for them, which would then violate the objective right of self-ownership of the people who are having to labor to furnish all this food that is suddenly everyone’s “right” to have. This is clearly contradictory and nonsensical.
All humans have a right to eat, they have a right to labor to improve property that will then grow food, or to labor and receive a wage or to barter for food. No one has a right to force anyone else to perform labor on their behalf, be it in raising food, providing education, drawing water, or providing medical care. No one has a legitimate claim to the labor or property owned by someone else.
Where there is no force, however, there is no violation of one’s right of self-ownership. It’s popular to assert that capitalism is slavery as it forces people to work in order to buy things needed to live. This childish belief ignores the fact that work is going to have to be performed by someone if anyone is going to expect to eat; crops don’t grow themselves, livestock doesn’t raise and butcher itself, etc. It is because of the voluntary division of labor that each individual doesn’t have to grow their own food, build their own smartphones and construct their own automobiles.
In the USA, few are really forced into any job, they’re free to leave at any time. That doing so is a risk, and risk makes many people uncomfortable, and discomfort tends to lead to inaction, doesn’t amount to an individual being “forced” to stay at a job they hate, no matter how “trapped” they might feel. After all, on the first day of that lousy job, the person working it agreed to the terms and signed up.
Related to the understanding of what is a right and what isn’t, and what is force and what isn’t, is the knowledge of what the limits of one’s legitimate concerns are; what we call one’s “business.”
Too often we rail against people expressing themselves in ways we don’t like for whatever reason when whatever it is they’re doing doesn’t actually damage our person or our property. This is always problematic because each individual’s legitimate concerns end at the edge of their property line. A person is free to dislike homosexuality because of some religious belief or another, he’s just not free to interfere with what his gay neighbors are doing on their own property when it is causing him no damage.
A person is free to dislike firearms and therefore choose not to own any. They are not free to dictate in any way what firearms their neighbor may choose to own when him simply possessing them causes harm to no one else’s person or property.
A person is free to dislike cocaine and therefore choose not to use it. That person has no right to interfere with their neighbor who likes to use cocaine and harm no one else’s person or property in the process.
A person is free to dislike prostitution and therefore never solicit a hooker. That person has no right to demand an armed gang prevent his neighbor from bringing home a different hooker every night.
A person is free to dislike non-Muslims. That person has no right to execute a plot to fly airliners full of passengers into occupied buildings as an expression of this dislike.
A person is free to identify as whatever gender or sex or combination thereof they choose. No person has a right to force a private business owner to allow them to do anything on that business owner’s property that said business owner has chosen to disallow.
A person has a right to find far-right-wing speech terribly offensive. That person has no right to damage property or assault people because of the fact they’re offended.
The extent of one’s legitimate concerns, one’s “business,” is always at the end of their own property line. If another’s actions aren’t actively causing your person or your property harm (feels don’t count), you don’t have a legitimate complaint against them and are likely just being a busybody – and no one likes a busybody.
That the state constantly oversteps and declares “rights” that infringe upon individual self-ownership doesn’t negate that right philosophically, just physically based on the threat of violence. To misconstrue this as being somehow legitimate and to mistake, say, healthcare for being a right, is to decide that “might makes right.” Sadly, most Americans do just that, so long as they think they’ll benefit from the redistribution of the stolen property.
Treatise IV: Logic
We are bombarded daily by a deluge of messages and “arguments” from the TV and radio news media and from various outlets that populate the social media landscape. Young people attending school or college are hit with even more from a wider variety of sources. Every time we open our Facebook app or check our Twitter feeds, we are hit with all manner of assertions and declarations meant to move our needles and change our way of thinking. Some of these can be very effective.
It is important then to understand the ancient rules of logic and rhetoric, because usually, the most effective “arguments” that we’re presented with aren’t arguments at all. Usually, they’re debasements of logic known as “logical fallacies.” These assertions usually strive to make a point by playing upon the listener’s emotions rather than by presenting a logical, factual argument.
How many times have we all seen a black-and-white picture of starving African children that some hipster has captioned with “capitalism kills” and posted on Facebook? This is a classic example of an “appeal-to-emotion” logical fallacy. It uses first a visually striking, visceral image that immediately puts the viewer into a state of heightened emotions and then suggests a focus for the empathy-turned-moral-outrage by blaming capitalism. No African country with mass starvation problems uses any sort of capitalist economic structure. Aid sent from Western, nominally-capitalist countries typically gets misappropriated by the governments of those impoverished nations. These underlying facts are totally lost in the emotional gut-punch the meme delivers, as was the point.
More ghoulish yet were those who used photos taken of the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas mass-shooting in 2017 and then posted them with captions that condemned the NRA. Never mind that the perpetrator broke a huge variety of laws before he even fired the first shot that terrible day, laws that all failed to stop him from what he was determined to do. That fact and many, many other salient ones are easy to forget when looking at images of a blood-soaked plaza filled with the bodies of the dead and dying beneath a black-trimmed, bold-faced white font telling you to blame the NRA.
This tactic, of course, predates social media and the Internet by eons. Pro-Lifers have been using photos of aborted fetuses to shock and horrify people into believing the state should violently take rights away from women for decades – it apparently works, because they keep doing it. And obviously, it goes back farther still.
There are many, many other examples of logical fallacies. Blessedly, a quick Google search will turn up several good lists, most of which do a better job of explaining the various rules of logic and rhetoric than I could here – and doing so would make this treatise anything but succinct. It is definitely worth the effort, however, to familiarize yourself with the common ones. In addition to the aforementioned “appeal-to-emotion” there’s the “strawman,” “argument from outcome,” “burden of proof,” “gas-lighting,” and a host of others.
Being able to guard against allowing fallacious arguments to sway one’s thinking is a vital skill for humans to possess. Going back to the appeal-to-emotion example; what sort of reaction is the starving-African-children meme or post-Vegas-shooting meme supposed to elicit? One on the same level as the stimulus, an emotional one. What use is that?
Outrage alone doesn’t typically lead one to formulate a helpful conclusion to anything. In my own experience, when I’m mad at something, I’m usually too busy being mad at it to come up with a good way to fix whatever it is about it that’s irritating me. Be it a malfunctioning electronic device, an uncooperative car, or a problematic coworker – anger is an impediment delaying me in getting around to whatever it is I need to do to fix the issue. Letting it irritate me is my own fault and is counter-productive.
It is because we as a species are not terribly adept at thinking rationally when we’re upset that appeals-to-emotion work well when cynically employed against us by people trying to manipulate the way we think for their own ends.
It’s easy to think to one’s self: “yes, yes, the NRA is a terrorist organization” when you’re looking at a horrific scene and the words are there in black-and-white. It’s far harder to think, when staring at that same image: “wait, the NRA has always preached responsibility and gun-safety, and in the immediate aftermath supported an increase on regulations related to devices used in this very event.”
Likewise for the first example. By design, “look what capitalism has done to these poor children,” comes far more readily to mind for most people than does “wait, that looks like 1980s Ethiopia, which most definitely wasn’t capitalist.”
Left unexamined, the opinions that form from exposure to such fallacious arguments can and will take hold and serve to cloud a person’s judgment and thinking ever afterward.
Every human owns their own bodies, perhaps the most important part of that overall possession is the bit between one’s ears. Exerting and maintaining self-ownership of our minds is a responsibility each individual most look after with great care.
Treatise V: The State
For all Americans, the single biggest force that influences the conduct of our lives and the degree to which we’re able to sustain our existence is the State and the various levels of government each individual American is subject to.
Where I currently sit, I’m subject to city ordinances, county regulations, state laws and federal laws. Most Americans are under the jurisdiction of four layers of government, minimum, yet few actually ever bother to ponder the nature of government. Few will ever ask themselves: “What makes government unique?”
Such is an important question, however, as government is clearly unique among human institutions. What is it, exactly, that sets it apart?
The answer is simple: a monopoly upon the legal initiation of violence.
If I run up behind a woman walking down the sidewalk and snatch her purse away, I’ve committed a violent crime by assaulting her and taking her property. That same woman, however, will have at least one-third of her earnings stolen away from her each year by the government. They get to take it right out of her paycheck, no need to come and physically put hands on her. Unless, that is, she refuses to pay and evades taxes. Then, before too long, someone with a gun will come and physically apprehend her and put her into a cage.
Given that this legal monopoly on initiating violence is government’s sole defining characteristic, we must remember that it is also its very essence. The state is violence incarnate.
Every single law, no matter how benign and helpful-sounding, is underwritten by a promise of violence.
No law is legitimate if it requires a use of violence by the state that would be prohibited to an individual member of the citizenry. Every individual has the innate right to violently resist an attempted burglar, rapist, mugger or murderer, no badge and blue costume required. That theft, rape, assault and murder are outlawed for all is a necessity for any civilization.
However, the state being violence incarnate, it is free to enact other laws and those are enforced with the exact same methodology as laws against the aforementioned objectively evil actions. The state requires money to run on, and it collects that money by taxing – stealing – the property of individuals who produced wealth via their own labor; labor they performed with their bodies that they own outright. An individual who takes another’s property against their will has committed a crime by violating the victim’s right to property. The magical mantle of government, however, is meant to excuse the state in engaging in this obviously criminal activity.
The state goes on to enact many, many more self-serving laws, all enforced with violence and all of them in violation of every human’s right to self-ownership. The “War on Drugs” has been a 40+-year assault on individual self-ownership, the result of which is to find the United States with the highest number of prisoners per capita of any other nation on Earth.
Jim Crow, segregation and the denial of equal protection rights to gay couples are examples of government abuses that go back decades, abuses that all violated individuals’ rights to self-ownership. Gun control laws, business licensing laws, federal land ownership and management, immigration laws, business regulations and onerous environmental regulations are all examples of the state using its monopoly on violence to violate individuals’ right to self-ownership and property on massive scales.
But, government is also made up of individuals, and when we remember this fact, the state suddenly doesn’t seem like such an impenetrable monolith. It’s easy to understand an individual’s motivations within any workplace and then scale them up to the bureau, agency, administration or department they work for. Most of us want to excel and exceed at our jobs and grow our companies. For those who work in government, the equivalent is to find more things for themselves, or their bureau, agency, administration or department to do.
Of course, government can and does only do one thing, and that’s ruin things. And so, each time a government body’s scope of responsibility grows, individuals will find their rights being violated all the more. Growing a government agency naturally means it needs more money than it did during the last budget cycle, and so that will be further underwritten by yet more violence in the form of taxation/theft.
For eons, humans tried to use alchemy to turn lead into gold and failed because nothing within the practice of alchemy was capable of changing lead into a precious metal. For eons, humans have sought to create a free and peaceful society by continually adjusting the amount of institutionalized violence the government ruling said society wields. It is my contention that we are having the same problem that the alchemists had. Nothing within the practice of institutionalized violence is capable of turning a populace into a free and peaceful society.
I am not suggesting modern humans go without the “services” government today “provides.” Those services, if truly needed and beneficial, would be provided (more efficiently) by a private company in the absence of a government monopoly on said service. After all, the government itself didn’t invent any of the industries or services it regulates or provides today; it merely used its monopoly on violence to assert new authority over things like telegraph lines, radio frequency bands, herbal plants, airport security, internet access, etc. Private companies seeking to profit by offering the public something they didn’t know they needed is how we have come to enjoy the standard of living we have now, a standard that has been slowly but steadily diminished as government grows to regulate each new technology.
Treatise VI: Evil
Not for nothing that in several major world religions, the sin mankind committed that doomed it forever was to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Such knowledge would certainly be handy, and may even make the need for a God moot. Similarly, Buddha sought to identify the source of all human suffering and put it down to desire – after first concluding that life itself was pretty much suffering (the first of his Four Noble Truths). Throughout history, all human civilizations and cultures struggled to identify the source of human suffering and to codify definitions of good and evil.
Simply identifying evil actions was difficult for ancient man, just as it is for some modern humans. Theft, assault and murder were outlawed most anywhere that was considered civilized; yet even then, slavery and rape were commonplace. Even in the ages of antiquity, humans were able to excuse monstrous actions if they were first deemed “legal” by the ruling lord – a disgusting tradition that continued on for ages and followed Europeans to the New World with the slave trade.
If something as hideous as slavery could have been legal as recently as a century-and-a-half ago in the “Land of the Free,” then clearly the legal status of an action is a poor metric by which to measure whether or not it’s objectively good or evil.
A far better factor to consider is the intent of the person committing the action. What specific outcome was he or she trying to bring about? Almost always, an evil action is one committed out of irrational greed.
A murderer shoots a romantic rival because he irrationally and greedily wants the woman in question – who’s already chosen the victim over the shooter – to love him instead. A man shoots an armed intruder in self-defense because he’s broken into his home and tried to kill him for loving the same woman the intruder wants.
Both scenarios above involve someone getting badly wounded or killed by another. Yet we can see that one action is objectively evil and the other is at least morally neutral if not objectively good because the self-defense action saved an innocent person from harm or death. The difference is intent. The murderer intended to take the victim’s life, which he has no right to. The man fired in self-defense to ward off an attack he did nothing to deserve. It was the shooter’s irrational greed led him to commit an evil act, that of attacking another.
Echoes of this notion can be found throughout history; we hear them in the aforementioned Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, namely the second, that desire is the cause of suffering. The Old Testament warns us not to covet thy neighbor’s wife or goods. The late Stoics cautioned repeatedly against irrational desire and ambition while urging people to learn to recognize what is within their power to change and what isn’t.
Evil then, is a deliberate eschewing of these basic truths. History is populated by men most everyone agrees are evil and they are so because they acted upon irrational greed. Is there a more irrationally greedy notion on Earth than the desire to rule even one other human, let alone entire other nations? The 20th Century’s world wars were fought over this very desire; and then the Cold War that followed was itself just a standoff between two superpowers that irrationally wanted to greedily exert influence far beyond their own borders.
The knowledge of good and evil cannot be gained from eating a piece of fruit, clearly. To suss out that knowledge is to first be mindful of intent and desire. If what a person wants can only be had by intentionally harming the person or property of an innocent victim, then that desire is itself irrationally greedy and acting upon it is objectively evil.
This is just as true in the example of the romantic rivals above as it was in 2007 when bankers and traders were blowing up a housing bubble when they knew the inevitable “pop” would hurt a lot of the people they’d hoodwinked while earning themselves a nice little payday – and their companies a taxpayer bailout.
It’s not irrational, greedy or evil to desire money or love. It is irrational and greedy to desire money that you must hurt someone else to get, or to desire a lover whom doesn’t return your affections. It’s evil to take actions that seek to bring about the realization of those irrational desires when those actions harm the person or property of another.
Apply this judgment – that of intent – to government laws, policies and actions. You’ll soon find that much of what our government does today is motivated purely by the irrational greed of the very powerful men who pull the strings. It’s not irrational or greedy, for example, to want to sell pills to Americans. It is irrationally greedy – and therefore evil – for a company to have the state lock people into cages for treating ailments with a plant rather than the government-approved pill everyone must buy from them, however. Not surprisingly, the strongest lobbying against legalizing marijuana comes from drug companies.
Treatise VII: Good
Previously, we identified “evil” as being an action taken in an effort to realize irrational greed. An “evil person” is one who is motivated primarily, if not entirely, by irrational greed – that is, greed that requires the harming of another’s person or property to satisfy the evil person’s desire.
“Good,” however cannot simply be the absence of evil. To engage solely in actions that aren’t motivated by irrational greed doesn’t define a human as being “good,” but merely “decent.” Not raping, robbing, assaulting, extorting or murdering people are examples of a human decency. Eschewing evil actions is the bare minimum civilization requires of its participants. A society that tolerates rape, assault, theft and murder isn’t civilized and won’t be a society for long as it will rip itself apart. “Goodness,” however requires something more – mindfulness and empathy.
A “decent” employer, for example, doesn’t mistreat their employees and pays them a reasonable wage. A “good” person who employs people treats them well and pays them as much a he or she can reasonably afford without jeopardizing the company or their own well-being. This is where mindfulness and empathy come in. It takes effort for a person to put themselves, mentally, into the position of another – particularly if they’re a subordinate of any sort – and try to empathize with their life.
An employer looking at the labor laws and the wage similar companies pay for similar work doesn’t have to pay an employee more than that average; but an empathetic one who realizes that extra dollar per hour will mean a lot to the employee is one who is going beyond mere human decency and is being a good person. Typically, “goodness” always requires more effort than “decency.” This is not to say that this formula can be pushed even farther into “super good,” by paying the employee far and away more than the value of the labor he or she performs is worth. Such an unsustainable practice would bring ruin to the entire company and end up harming a lot more people than the one person temporarily “helped” by being overpaid before being laid-off when the company went bust.
Humankind has been struggling to bring about a fair, just and “good” society for ages. It has consistently failed because we have sought to use evil actions to bring it about. Yet, undeterred, we keep electing politicians and we keep voting and playing along with the system in hopes someone is going to eventually enact just the right set of laws and regulations that will create utopia.
It’s a fool’s errand.
We can have an at least decent society if each of us looks inside and identifies our sources of irrational greed and works to disabuse ourselves of those notions while pledging to never act upon them. This would mean people realizing that the desire to dictate what a woman does with the fetus she carries is irrationally greedy. This would mean people admitting that being provided a living that is greater than the value of the labor they perform – if any – is irrationally greedy. This would mean people admitting that using the government to lock people up so as to protect their pill profits is irrationally greedy. This would mean recognizing that government agencies constantly looking for more things to control and regulate are being irrationally greedy. This would mean big multinational corporations acknowledging the irrational greed of having the military interfere in other countries on their behalf; and several other admittedly unlikely epiphanies.
We can only have a good society if we each take the above step, and then several more – if we pledge to work to be forever mindful and empathetic toward our fellow man and to give as much of ourselves as we can reasonably afford to help those around us who may be struggling. This is most certainly not a call for more taxes and a swelling of the welfare state – government “entitlement programs” are the least efficient way imaginable of “helping” anyone and they always fail as they are based entirely upon objectively evil actions – theft. No, this is a call for each and every individual person, be they a rank-and-file entry-level employee or the founder and CEO, to look inside and without and be mindful and empathetic of their fellow human’s needs.
That’s it and that’s all. There is no “magic bullet,” no “quick fix” no “turnkey solution” to the intractable problems facing humanity. We each have to instead work to treat others only as we’d like to be treated ourselves – there’s some more of than ancient wisdom we ignore.
We can have a society that is as decent or as good – or as evil – as the individual humans within it. As long as people continue to mistake their irrational greed for a human right, we will remain mired in this awful place American humans find themselves in during this 2018th year of the Common Era.
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