Essays on societies - If you have 2, give 1 to your friend..
June 14th 2007 02:37
So, on equality.
The way of seeing things can be defined as this: "all men should be treated as equal". The result of this is most of the times interpreted as "we should split the richness equally among people", even if they did not contributed for it in the same way.
Why do people tend to like this position so much, spetially among youngsters? Maybe because one of the things we can understand easily is that we can't compete all the time, and most of the times competition is not fair. But older people have more experience to say that, once you've worked a lot for a thing and saw the others around do nothing for it, you won't be happy to split the results equally...
Systems that try to apply more equality than merit tend normally to help people in need, taking from the part of society that "succeded" better in the system. In this way they try to "homogenizate" their society. This has an interest and can be considered even as the inevitable end of all societies (as Marx says): if people do not have the same access to things, there will allways exist people who want to change the status quo.
This seems to be a cool way of organising a society. But what are the problems on it?
The most important problem we can point is quite clear: if the people are not "oblied" to work, why would they work anyway? If you'll have the same exact wage in the end of the month if you work your ass off or if you sit and read the news all day, would you work as hard?
But obivously, if you understand how this kind of society work, you can see that if everyone starts thinking in the same way, things will not work at all. In places where people need to work harder to have a good quality of life this is even more clear.
Please consider that the environment around plays an important part in this thing...if you live in Brazil, where the food comes almost for free from nature and you don't have any natural disasters around, if the society works less, life will still carry on smoothly...
So, in conclusion we can see that "equality" can only be used as the most important value of a society if everybody understands why they adopted this system, and what they have to do to maintain it working. Otherwise it is destined to ruin, since the hole society would slowly stop (as no one would wake up to work..)
What makes me conclude that the best way to apply this system is in an educated society, where all people have good starting points (to use the same terminology as in the last post).
So one would say: but if you put everyone with good standards, they'll all be in the same starting point, and thus the first system would apply perfectly. Yes, it is a good way of seeing things! But notice that if we all have high levels of education, we can understand that the best way of a society to work is if everyone do his job.
Why? Simply because if you get rich and the guy by your side is having trouble to make his ends meet, he will try to steal your pretty car...so, in an egoist way, you don't want people to be in a lower level than you, so that they won't bother you begging for money in the streets...
hehe, so next time we'll put the 2 togheter again, to see which one better "fits" each case.
Cheers! Uula
The way of seeing things can be defined as this: "all men should be treated as equal". The result of this is most of the times interpreted as "we should split the richness equally among people", even if they did not contributed for it in the same way.
Why do people tend to like this position so much, spetially among youngsters? Maybe because one of the things we can understand easily is that we can't compete all the time, and most of the times competition is not fair. But older people have more experience to say that, once you've worked a lot for a thing and saw the others around do nothing for it, you won't be happy to split the results equally...
Systems that try to apply more equality than merit tend normally to help people in need, taking from the part of society that "succeded" better in the system. In this way they try to "homogenizate" their society. This has an interest and can be considered even as the inevitable end of all societies (as Marx says): if people do not have the same access to things, there will allways exist people who want to change the status quo.
This seems to be a cool way of organising a society. But what are the problems on it?
The most important problem we can point is quite clear: if the people are not "oblied" to work, why would they work anyway? If you'll have the same exact wage in the end of the month if you work your ass off or if you sit and read the news all day, would you work as hard?
But obivously, if you understand how this kind of society work, you can see that if everyone starts thinking in the same way, things will not work at all. In places where people need to work harder to have a good quality of life this is even more clear.
So, in conclusion we can see that "equality" can only be used as the most important value of a society if everybody understands why they adopted this system, and what they have to do to maintain it working. Otherwise it is destined to ruin, since the hole society would slowly stop (as no one would wake up to work..)
What makes me conclude that the best way to apply this system is in an educated society, where all people have good starting points (to use the same terminology as in the last post).
So one would say: but if you put everyone with good standards, they'll all be in the same starting point, and thus the first system would apply perfectly. Yes, it is a good way of seeing things! But notice that if we all have high levels of education, we can understand that the best way of a society to work is if everyone do his job.
Why? Simply because if you get rich and the guy by your side is having trouble to make his ends meet, he will try to steal your pretty car...so, in an egoist way, you don't want people to be in a lower level than you, so that they won't bother you begging for money in the streets...
hehe, so next time we'll put the 2 togheter again, to see which one better "fits" each case.
Cheers! Uula
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