General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Fast-Food Strikes Expand Across U.S. to 50 Cities [View all]Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)it is only through actively avoiding them.
Every skill beyond the most basic hunting/gathering/primitive agricultural, developed because of and depends on society. Therefore, every skill is required to keep the thing which allows them to exist and develop, society, going and improving. The garbage collector and the neurosurgeon are both necessary to society, and you place a greater value on the neurosurgeon because her skills are so much more specific and difficult to develop. However, if you take two identical civilizations and remove all the neurosurgeons from one and all the garbage collectors from the other, which will collapse? Does that mean that the garbage collector is more valuable than the neurosurgeon?
Both the garbage collector and the neurosurgeon are human beings with their one life. On what rational, logical, objective basis do you declare the neurosurgeon's life is worth more than the garbage collector? After all, society as a whole can exist perfectly well without the neurosurgeon, while it dissolves very quickly without someone taking the trash out.
Every member of a society contributes some portion of their life to maintaining and advancing that society, and therefore, each has a claim on that society, and once that claim is recognized by the society, a reviewing of the relative values of skills and contributions is inevitable. This does not demand "equal outcomes" (a Reich-Wing deflection used for so long, it has become 'common knowledge'), it does demand equal consideration. The value of every member of society is not the skills they posses or develop, but the life they contribute in it's function.
Enlightened self interest is an interesting idea, it just doesn't exist, and therefore cannot serve as a basis for anything beyond drug fueled debates among those of us that enjoy that kind of thing.