Worth

This is a response to an inquiry on reddit.

Thank you for your engaging and respectful manner of interaction. I will try and reciprocate such civility in my responses.

1.) Do we own ourselves and our time?

Yes, with many caveats. Ownership is a tricky thing. Responsibility is a slippery notion. I mean, I might 'own' a piece of land but should I be able to put toxic chemicals in the ground and water? Do I own that water? If I poison someone else with my negligence, should I have the land taken from me?

If I assume you agree with the water principle, I might extend that to more individual circumstances. If butterflies flapping their wings can cause rain to fall on Jeff Goldblum through a series of micro effects, are we, in some small way, responsible for the greater effects of our actions? At least to the degree we can reasonably predict the outcomes?

If we are to any degree responsible for the downline effects we cause, and if we are effected in any degree by the small and large movements of our fellow bipedal beasts, can we say we 'own' a small fraction of other people's well being because we have some fraction of responsibility for it? If we can change something or prevent it from being destroyed, are we response able? If we are able to respond, do we have some level of ownership?

2.) Is life finite?

Yes, with infinite degrees contained within.

3.) Individuals exchange time and energy for stuff?

Yes... but money and rights and ownership are... abstractions(?). Emergent properties of the sense of belonging and value we place on one another as human beings? Money is a symbol of value, the value we place on our assistance of each other. But when we get a Brazilian people together all trading tokens of worth for time and energy, it creates a system that determines the value of an individual and the system cannot always see the value of someone who is struggling to provide it value.

The system, the society, though, benefits from not letting the individuals whose value the system isn't immediately appreciative of fall to seeking unconventional ways of seeking value/worth within the society (crime).

So we either need to murder the unemployed and handicapped, or we need to find ways of utilizing and caring for those people who are struggling to please a system that is huge and often inhuman and too large to look at individual circumstances that contribute to those who struggle to find their place.

4.) Taking bad! We earn stuff!

Yes. But again, I think your idea of what a human is and what mine is, differ. I think you see humans as beings of light who attain perfect rationality and responsibility at the totally reasonable age of... 18? 21? The brain stops growing at 25, so... but we still are changing...

Anyway, I tend to think of the thinking ape as a squishy robot. Or a single cell.

Imagine if your cells had rights. Did the fat cells 'earn' their mass by the hard work of replicating and transforming energy to store? Does the body have a right to take that energy back? Is it fair to throw the skin cells of our hands out to protect the soft tissues of our insides?

There are plenty of independent cells that do their own thing, but I think integrating into a multicellular organism that might 'unfairly' tax you is better. This is why amoebas don't run the world even though there are Brazilians of them all over your hands and screen and face and mouth.

But if being a part of a multi-human organism of a society is irksome and you don't agree with the appropriation of energy and resources, you have the opportunity to alert the brain via neurons like Reddit and voting, but the kind of narrow evaluation of worth that I think you are referring to neglects the interconnected chaos that we live in.

The good news is, you are not forced to live subject to the tyranny of human law. You can live on a boat or an island. If you can set up a group of humans that demonstrates your vaunted independence and the value of individual's worth, you can demonstrate that it is a more noble, more dynamic system that can outcompete the multibeing organisms you find to be unfair, maybe.

I want to live in a society where everyone is free to pursue their highest potential. But we need to get there together, otherwise, even though I may owe all of my skills and knowledge to a society that worked together to not kill one another and educate helpless offspring such as my infant self, I might feel like I alone earned my place far beyond the rest of the group, and they might feel differently...

By surrendering some of our freedoms we gain many more. On an island or in the mountains, I have far fewer restrictions on my behavior, but I have exponentially fewer opportunities (since I have monetized this response to your question, do I owe you some amount of my earnings since you had a hand in its creation?). So, I might be leasing my money and property from the government, but in exchange I am free from so much suffering and have the opportunity to communicate with intelligent folks such as yourself who would never come to my island (it's covered in rats... racist ones).

So many words... if I could condense these thoughts, I would be a more effective communicator... oh well, thoughts?

What is 'ownership' to you? What are 'rights'? What is 'value'?

Edit: added some links, changed some words. I will, I hope, return.