It’s easy to act within accepted moral expectations when your circumstances are comfortable, but this breaks down easily when those circumstances change.
Imagine a circle, where we start at any point and work our way around until we arrive back where we started. Let’s say we begin at the point where we ask “what would you do?” and we end back at that point after accumulating challenges by investigating the implications of good intentions and assumed truths at each major stop. How would each step change the conclusion we first had, and our surety of it. I know what I think, but I know I could think or judge differently if I just knew more than I do now.
If we start with any question that contains the word YOU in, then we must establish what the YOU represents. You, are the psychological expression of personhood, a collection of experiences and traits that inhabit a physical body that is, by your estimation at least, the property of you the person. If this is so then we can start with the assumption that your right to do with you whatever you please, is immutable and without question.
At the next step we can challenge the above notion. It appears, if we accept it, that you have a certain freedom enabled because of the fact that you are your own property, which gives you freedom to do with that property whatever you wish. But our next question may be “what is a society?”. For that we have to use the person because the person is, along with other persons, a member of this society. Each has, we would assume, a responsibility to each other component part, persons. These responsibilities, and we may name them, remove autonomy in some fashion, therefore you are not as free as you were at the previous step.
From property and it’s justifications in philosophy, to it’s justifications in law. From consent, to voting and info, and back to the person. Each way of describing you, and your right to, or your right not to, we find complexity in.
The next step hops us on to the responsibility of you to act on behalf of the society, say maybe to go to war or to act against your own best interests so as to act in the interests of people who are not you, like sick people. We have assumed that you are not sick, but you are to contribute to ease their malady in a meaningful way. We assume that you are informed, but we ask you to participate in the education of those that are not informed in a meaningful way also. At this point we have identified what you owe by being a member of society, but you did not agree to this other than to be born into that society. It is the social contract, you do not sign it, others do not sign it for you, but it is assumed in law because a majority tacitly consents to it.
The next step is to identify what that society owes you…. an education, safety, health, sustenance, entertainment? These are all things that a person may need or want. The price of all this is revealed in the previous step, your part in the grand drama that is your tribe or society (these terms are interchangeable and only usually denote scale). Some of this has to be forced upon you, but that seems like it is not in keeping with the idea that you are your own property. Society has decided, as a body of people, that you must have an education, and healthcare, so that you be productive/useful enough to society’s needs, and pose no threat to other productive persons with your stupidity and ill heath. Society, expressed by government, which is a small body of people that are proposed as being representative, forces you to be in society and to adhere to it with laws.
So we now understand that there is no property that you are entitled to unless you have accumulated it by labour (earn and buy), or it has been gifted by your family, who themselves earned it or were given it by its controllers in a bargain for their loyalty (most large land ownership in Britain is the result of King Henry VIII granting it in the 16th century). And we understand that there is a debt burden you were born to owe to society regarding your entitlement to benefit from society. But let’s go on…
Now we tackle a misunderstood portion of being in a society, the price of being entertained and assured. We refer to this as capitalism, and it is a multi faceted attack on the idea of personhood because it acts to quell the natural instincts and replace them with desires for products. These desires cause us to expend great efforts and time to accumulate tokens that we will use to purchase items that we will then not value. We exchange our labour for money, we produce things at a low cost, then we buy those things at a higher price, this is so that some people can accumulate the capital that will give them the power to influence society to their advantage. Their goal is to be unrestrained by the mechanisms that restrain you, to be freer than you. In this they have an already accepted, in law, advantage, that they are what Marx referred to as the controllers of labour because they are those people who legally own resources.
Now we are in a divided society, one where some people are persons because they are free, and some people believe they have the same freedoms, but remain constrained by the rules set down by those that are actually free. In these circumstances there is a need for the rhetoric that assures and fools those that are not free to own themselves, that they are free. We call this propaganda, or marketing, or the public good. Sometimes we call it religion (which is the same in purpose). We are starting to realise that we own ourselves in narrower ways than we first thought at the start of this piece?
Next we have the most nefarious facet of your participation, as a person, in society. I refer to the need for your acquiescence to pre-agreed and codified norms, canons of knowledge on structure, seemingly underpinned by moral teachings. The agreed rights and wrongs as dictated by powerful individuals (the truly free), and spread as a form of education by instructed teachers. This belays your resistance and your ability to stray in thought, because you have been conditioned. If I were to describe myself as an anarchist (which I am) then you might assume that I cared about nothing because that is what you understand anarchy to be, a form of destruction. I would argue that every critic is an anarchist because they want difference, and difference means that what is built upon sand (capitalism, liberalism) must fall so that it can be rebuilt upon rock. Societies tend to change rather than to stop and restart anew, this is a problem for the anarchist because today it builds tomorrow upon yesterday, it does not start over.
What of what is inserted into the brain, what smart persons, motivated by their egos and funded by the aforementioned free people (the now powerful actors, or religious leaders) create to convince you that you need to pursue? The Ikea nesting instinct is strong in a western liberal capital society, but why is it so that a person, a supposedly free person, one who owns himself as an expression of his will, can be manipulated so easily into going along with edicts that do not serve their best interests as a person? In another country we may see someone so convinced that there is a future for them beyond this existence that they can pull a cord and explode in a busy marketplace, ending their own person and many other persons. In another country we can see some powerful people sponsoring ideas that do not fit with what is scientifically provable, often campaigning that nonsense be taught in schools. This means that to believe things, even supposedly moral things, can remove ownership of the person also. Looks like an inescapable bind that, because a person has to buy into something to function at all.
If we strip away entirely the facets of belief and society we would return the person to a primal state, he would then have to draw his own conclusions about the phenomenons he encountered in the world, but in a sense he would be free and uninfluenced. What would matter to this person other than survival? That postulate has so little progress in it that most would not support it, but there are some (John Zerzan).
Let us complete the circle, we have gone over the person, the person in relation to another person, the person in relation to a societal power, the person in relation to the persons who own resources, the person in relation to religion, and the person in relation to knowledge. We are back at the idea of owning the self as an expression.
Am I mine?
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