Wasabisoft

Capitalism contains a fairly efficient and fluid value system: a person, item or service is worth whatever demand for that person, item or service is willing to pay.  Any particular commodity in our society is worth more than a comparable commodity if it possesses some quality that the prospective buyer finds useful.  However, in our society there also exists a curious disconnect that appears to revolve around undue assignments of value; consider, as a baseline example, that a member of our society is allowed to vote (and thus wield extreme power over the direction of our nation) irrespective of their value to society (i.e., why should felons be allowed to vote?).  Similarly, the cutoff for when a growing child is allowed to vote is an arbitrary constant almost completely unrelated to value: age.  What exactly makes an 18-year old D-student more competent to vote responsibly than a 17-year old genius?  Voting and citizenry rights aside for a moment (well… probably another article will be in order very soon): value of an individual, from a societal viewpoint, seems like it should derive from the individual’s demonstrated potential to contribute to society, just as value of a commodity is determined by the commodity’s degree of usefulness to the buyer.  So it seems to me that if we, as a society, really gave a shit about our fellow citizens and their well being, then we could best help the disadvantaged to improve their value by enabling them to raise their potential.  The most effective manner by which I believe we can achieve this is by supplying our citizens with biological contentment, allowing them to focus upon skill/education development opportunities.  And, yes, when I say “supplying”, I mean that society should foot the bill.

I like the last sentence before the page break to be a bit of an attention grabber… just like a LEGITIMATE news outlet!  It made YOU click on the “Read the rest of this entry>>>” link didn’t it?  Huzzah for manipulating the masses!

First, a bit of a clarification is in order: for the duration of my writing down things of a philosophical nature, contentment is defined by me as a state of being satisfied that one’s needs are being met.  In a biological sense, contentment derives from the fulfillment of basic needs in adequacy; an animal with adequate food, water, shelter and health could be said to biologically content.  Animals with higher orders of intellect also have emotional needs that, while they are not AS important as the biological needs, are vital to the animal’s mental well being (and “happiness”, as we determine it for animals with whom we have yet to converse).  Things like environmental quality (as simple as adequate sunshine and fresh air for some animals), companion animals and stuff to play with (called “enrichments” in the zoo vernacular, I think) all fall into this category.  An animal’s quality of life is a combination of their biological and emotional contentment; this holds true whether the animal in question is a cow, a jellyfish, or a human being… though the needs to be met in order to determine contentment in each case varies a bit between species.  For one thing, jellyfish don’t have spines.  Not even the MANLY jellyfish.

Now then:  for an animal as (relatively) simple as a cow, emotional contentment can be pretty solidly defined: fresh air, sunshine, other cows, a place to get out of the rain and freedom from predators (man excluded) are generally enough to promote cow contentment.  This is in ADDITION to the necessities of biological contentment (green grass, clean water, the absence of disease) that are pretty much a precondition to the cow living long enough to enjoy the whole emotional contentment thing.  For humans the biological necessities are also easily quantified, though they include the additional variables of security and communication for animals as socially dependant as we.  The definition of emotional contentment, however, is EXTREMELY fuzzy as the aspects of emotional contentment (which I’ll refer to as “happiness” from now on for us human folk)  vary greatly between individuals.  As such, while a government can do much to provide for its citizens’ biological needs (and even ours actually does so in times of disaster… eventually) it simply CANNOT furnish us with happiness, as whatever you get in your Emergency Happiness Airdrop (E-HA!) package to bring you joy may be completely worthless (even disgusting) to me.  So any effort to increase our citizens’ happiness and overall welfare (as might be undertaken by a government that gives a fuck about its people) must be aimed at enabling those citizens to pursue their OWN happiness (as per, I don’t know, the goddamned Declaration of Independence, for example) by reducing (or outright eliminating, as I shall later suggest) the biological survival imperative which impedes such pursuits.

One of the extremely basic means by which I believe a mature and responsible government can provide this kind of contentment involves a bit of backstory from my past.  Back in… fuck… like, 2003, I think, I lived with honorable Gelly-san at the old Jimmy Swaggart dormatory building at his ministry in Baton Rouge.  It was ORIGINALLY meant to house the extremely credulous while they attended Bible College, an education which would TRULY come in handy out in the real world.  Anyways, so the place was basically a high-rise college dorm, the units comprised of two smallish studio rooms equipped with a sink, thermostat, some electrical outlets, a phone jack and a shared bathroom.  I stayed in something similar when I attended REAL college back in the day (for all of two semesters… ever wonder why I DON’T list my credentials anywhere on this site?  It’s ’cause they’re NONEXISTANT!  Bwahahahahahahahaha!) so I’m going to make a huge assumption here that there are a great many college dorm rooms set up along the same lines and that staying in one of these (and splitting them with a roommate, in my case) isn’t considered terribly onerous by the general population.  Hell, these things are a goodly step up from Army barracks (where you have mass toilets and showers, a very unsavory memory, let me tell you), so I’m going to proceed like this kind of studio (and half a bathroom) existence is pretty bearable.  While residing in the Jimmy Swaggart dorms I was perfectly happy with my environs.  They were very sparse quarters, and I DID have to run a bit of a religious zealot gauntlet every time I entered or exited the building, but it was a place to live and I was – and here’s the important bit – content to live there.  It sure beat living in my truck, which I consider a bit of a step down on the ol’ quality-of-life scale.

So here’s where my radical (and surprisingly unpopular) idea comes in: how horrible would it be for us (the government) to provide quarters of this (relatively) low quality to whoever in our society requires them?  Stay with me for a second: picture a building of this type, all studio units (with their OWN bathroom, if I had a choice) or two room suites (for families) on the upper levels; a cafeteria, basic clinic/welfare center (health care article to follow), common area and security section on the bottom floor.  Kind of a combination dorm/student union setup is what I’m going for here.  Come to think of it, didn’t our dorm back in Lafayette have a sandwich shop and Chik-fil-a on the bottom floor?  Anyways.  Making such a facility available FOR FREE to any member of our society who requests it would provide complete biological contentment: basic shelter, health and sanitation facilities, food at the 24-hour cafeteria… I’d suggest even providing VoIP phone service in the rooms, as that shit is so absurdly cheap to operate that there’s really no reason NOT to do so.  Besides, some telecommunications tools will contribute greatly to the occupants’ ability to function.

I’ve long had a big moral problem with the way we treat our least fortunate in this society.  All the various government programs designed for the nominal purpose of assisting those people are all of the not-quite variety… welfare checks are not quite enough to pay the rent, educational financial aid is not quite enough to pay for college, and tax breaks do exactly WHAT for people who aren’t even ABLE to earn an income?  This public dormitory idea does, I feel, a pretty good job of providing everything a person needs for survival, which frees up all their faculties to devote towards skill acquisition and other forms of happiness pursual.  Somehow, I think that would be a MUCH better investment of tax monies than simply writing a person a check that won’t ensure their survival (assuming they even put those funds towards survival expenditures at all).  Hell, even the Republicans should be behind this if they think about it for a second: removing completely a person’s survival needs also removes their desire to acquire funds for the payment of said survival needs. For many people of insufficient social skill, turning to crime to support themselves (and their families) becomes a welcome alternative to, say, FUCKING DYING.  So by providing these people with all their necessities we can go a long way towards preventing altogether some of the low grade crimes (and reaping savings in the process) that are most likely to pose a danger to you and your home and your family.  (NOTE: Republicans usually respond best to fear-based arguments!  Try this fun activity with your Republican friends: theorize to them that maybe the reason we haven’t found Osama Bin Laden yet is that he’s hiding in their Grandmother’s basement!  You’ll be talking them down from the nearest bell tower for DAYS!)

Getting to the point here: not only is providing biological necessities for our population the morally responsible thing to do, it should also enable these people to devote the time and energy formerly spent just staying alive towards improving their own value to society, thus making society stronger as a whole.  I would go so far as to suggest replacing our Welfare system ENTIRELY by providing these facilities instead.  I think we might actually come out ahead on that deal, even discounting the benefit of a better educated, happier populace.  And to be perfectly honest… the cow from the weak metaphor earlier in this post is better provided for than our own citizens.  Some will contend that a cow has more value than many lower class members of our society; I contend that a cow given the same disadvantages that made the lower class people lower class in the first place would be a pretty sorry quadruped, destined to be culled at the earliest opportunity.  Thankfully we don’t take THAT particular approach towards our fellow humans… though Capitalism itself is not terribly far off.  Look… it’s just way more cost-effective in the long run to provide these basic biological necessities for our citizens (thus enabling them to make a greater contribution to society… or even make a contribution at all) instead of condemning them to struggle their way through life because they can never build enough resources to improve themselves.  Hell, such an option would have really bailed MY ass out back in the day.  And best of all (from a philosophical perspective), this program would be precisely in line with the Golden Rule: assist the fulfilment of others as you would have them assist your own.