Sunday, March 28, 2010

what is fair?

If everyone had the same opportunities and abilities, that would be fair. I don’t think that either ideal Capitalism or ideal Communism are the perfect fair world. I think that a fair world is one in which everyone is born with enough to be happy, and can get to a higher place without exploiting anyone along the way, but not too high. I think that a fair world would be one without inheritance, one where everyone starts in the same place and is given the same level of options.
In a fair world, no one could tell anything about you from looking at you except for what you had decided to make of yourself. In a fair world, everyone would be self-made. We would make everything ourselves or voluntarily for each other. There would be no need for charity, but we would give each other things out of natural generosity, not an attempt to be quote-unquote “virtuous”.
We would all naturally look basically the same, but we could alter our appearances however we wanted, and people would consider other people’s physical appearance the way they consider art in a museum; carefully, knowing that everything they see had been arranged to invoke thoughts and emotions in the viewer.
When I say that we would look the same, I do not mean that we would have the same features or skin or anything like that. People would look just as varied as they do now. But the difference would be that the body and face would be seen as a blank slate, not a collection of classifying traits that came with social baggage. I mean this in terms of gender as well as race.
People would travel all the time. We would not have this notion of “work” as a pointless task whose only purpose is to get money from an employer. Instead, our lives would function as a sort of tangible version of the Hindu and Buddhist idea of Karma, as I understand it. We would do something that helped another person, or moved foreword our human culture in some way, and, sooner or later, we would get something in return. No one would have one set employment. We would drift, volunteering to help whoever was nearby with whatever they were doing. For example, no one would stay on a farm for an entire lifetime. When you saw a farm, if you had nothing else to do, you would go and work there for a few hours, or maybe a few days, just to help. Maybe you would take some food with you.
Volunteerism and giving would be the rule. You help and work not because you are expecting to be compensated, but because you know the vibrations will come back to you sooner or later.
Our society would be much less clannish. We would be less attached to our families. Relationships needn’t go in stages; when you meet someone, you can talk to them just like you would talk to someone you had known your whole life. The main problem, I think, with our attitude towards others now is that we have a kind of “everyone is out to get me, better huddle close with the ones I’m not afraid of” attitude.
I said before that we would travel. This is true. We would be acquainted with many different cultures, not just our own. Cultures needn’t all be the same, but they needn’t be so segregated, either. If there were an element of some culture that we liked, we could adopt it. This would be the main advantage of a greater mixing of peoples.
The other reason that I say we would be less familial is that in a society where one associates with one’s parents, one is born with privilege, power, and an idea of where one is among the social hierarchy. In a world with no social hierarchy, one sees no reason to stay with one’s “own people”. If everyone is equal (different, but equal), then there is no reason not to be friends with everyone. People would not be afraid of each other as they are now.
The two main reasons that people are afraid of each other are this: we are afraid of what is different, and we rightfully know that there are dangerous people out there. Neither of these problems would exist.
People would not be afraid of differences for the reasons I have explained above; mixing of cultures, travel, an understanding that humans are different but equal, equality at birth, a looser familial structure, etc.
Also, there would be no need to be afraid of each other. Everyone in this world is born, like I said in the beginning, with equal opportunities and abilities. If we have equal opportunities and abilities, right off the bat there would be fewer people who hurt others and commit crimes, because they don’t need to. The other thing is that everyone would be intensely aware of that sort of manifest Karma that I mentioned above. We wouldn’t hurt each other because we would know that it was pointless; the bad vibrations would just bounce right back.