The Human Plight

Great Debates
1

Iraq. Darfur. Palestine.

Or a residential neighborhood in Suburbia, California.

In some places, you fear for your life every minute of every day. In other places, you can sleep comfortably without even locking your door or making any provisions for self-defense.

Why is it that some people have life so easy (most citizens of the USA, for example)* - yet others may not have a happy day in their entire life?*

I am not looking for facts about local security, nor unthinking commentary regarding the obvious direct causes of a specific conflict. I am seeking responses on more of a philosophical level. Mention of “a god” is allowed if it applies to your specific response; however, religious debate is not the goal of this thread.

For example: perhaps those crises are supposed to make it so the rest of us don’t take things for granted. But I don’t think it’s worth it. I would rather be ungrateful than to see other people suffer as they do. (This last paragraph here is not necessarily my answer, and it is certainly not complete. I’m just trying to give you guys an idea of what I’m looking for.)

2

Well, there are two different senses of “explain why there is great inequality in the world.” It can either mean “explain the *cause * of this inequality” or “explain the reason/justification for this inequality.” As for the former sense, causes are complex, and vary from case to case; I doubt if a general answer can be given (not even human stupidity or wickedness–not all suffering arises from these causes). As for the latter question (which I take to be the question you are really asking–what is the reason or justification for this inequality), the idea that there is a reason for the inequality implies that someone made things this way for a reason. This implies either (a) a person or people arranging the world this way for some reason, and (b) a divine being creating and sustaining a world with this suffering in it. (a) is merely an implausible conspiracy theory. As for (b), I don’t believe in God, so I won’t endorse that either. (And furthermore, I don’t think any of the reasons given by theists for why God might allow such injustice are very plausible.) So in my view, these injustices have causes, not reasons.

3

I gently suggest to you that, if you are not looking for factual answers, this properly belongs in Great Debates or In My Humble Opinion. :slight_smile:

4

Life isn’t fair.

5

I’ve always thought that life was completely luck of the draw. Personally, I was born into a lower middle class family in a country and era where upward mobility was thought to be a birthright. My parents had crappy social skills but were honest hardworking folk who assumed their kids were going to college.

I was lucky enough not to have any extremely traumatic childhood experiences, no major societal barriers, and no debilitating physical or mental diseases. I feel like I got dealt a decent hand.

Contrast this with someone caught up in an ethnic conflict in Africa, captured as a prisoner and sold into slavery. Or a serf caught up during a particularly bad couple years of the Bubonic plague. Or a jew born in Poland in 1930. Or a rich kid in Beverly Hills with abusive parents. Bummer, I say.

So, being born in an affluent country in a time where there is still loads of natural beauty in the world, unbelievable advances in medical science, abundant and amazing artistic endeavor, and no wars when I was of age to be conscripted. Throughout human history, I had one of the top 1% chances.

I attribute it to random chance, nothing else. I ain’t special, just lucky.

6

Since the OP calls for a discussion rather than the answer to a factual question, let’s move this to Great Debates.

samclem GQ moderator

7

O.K.,

So we have “it’s just luck,” “no reason,” and “life isn’t fair.”

I don’t want to accept this. There must be something, there must be a reason; this isn’t a case of “why is the sky blue?” This is the indiscriminate killing of millions of innocent people every year, and the wrecking of many lives more. Someone here must be able to point us in the right direction.

Thanks for moving the thread, Sam, I was thinking about requesting that just now.

8

What do you want to accept? Karma? Predestination?

9

You are confusing two separate issues.

  1. What do some have it easy? Luck. Plain, unfiltered luck. That luck is either in the “I am lucky I picked these parents” and/or “I am lucky I was born with these characteristics.”

HOWEVER, that is not related to happiness!

These is research that shows that wealth does not bring happiness. There is also research that shows that your happiness is set, and that experiences only knock you off of your baseline for a bit and then you return to the prior level of happiness. Check out Easterlin’s work at USC.

10

Do you despair of all intraspecific aggression or only human?

11

The OP seems to feel (correct me if I’m wrong) that all human experience ought to be roughly equal, from some moral/philosophical standpoint. Why is that?

12

The world will continue to be the way it is regardless of your opinion of it. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

13

Why does human life, except for a few, seem to have so much misery and suffering?

Well, why shouldn’t it? Imagine a group of monkeys. The monkeys scratch for food and water, they fight each other for position and status, occasionally an eagle or snake or leopard eats one of them, or they get sick, or have an accident, and eventually all of them die, every last one, except perhaps they’ve managed to reproduce themselves a couple of times, so the average number of monkeys increases or decreases over time, depending on how much food and water and leopards are around.

How happy do you think those monkeys are going to be? Why SHOULD they be happy most of the time? The ones that survive to reproduce were the lucky ones. And the only reason they want to live and reproduce is because any monkey that didn’t care if it lived or died, or that didn’t care to reproduce, doesn’t pass on it’s genes to the next generation, and to the extent that a desire to live and reproduce has a genetic cause, those genes are going to be overrepresented in the next generation.

So, those monkeys are us. This is the default human condition…as a smart but not too smart hunter-gatherer that makes an occasional tool.

The default condition of mankind for human prehistory is as a hunter-gatherer living by his wits, the default condition of manking for human history is as a subsistance farmer scratching a living out of the dirt. And the mortality rate has held steady at 100%. Except humans have occasionally worked out methods of producing more food, or making collective decisions, or using external energy sources (like fire! Fire Goooooood!) that keep us from dying.

So, rule of law, democracy, capitalism, these are social innovations that we’ve kind of floundered into. Nobody recognized these things as social goods right away, they aren’t intuitive. Rule by decree, monarchy, planned economics and such make more sense to people. But societies that implemented some of these social ideas–event to a limited extent–found that they drastically increased prosperity. And we monkeys like food, we like soft places to sleep, we like funny things to watch, we like not seeing our children dying, we like not feeling agonizing pain. So eventually places that somehow or other managed to implement the formula for good governance found themselves to be good places to live compared to places that didn’t. So much so that people nowadays consciously try to implement those formulas, which sometimes even works, although most times it doesn’t.

No reason to do so, except avoiding that agonizing pain and death I mentioned earlier. If you don’t mind pain and death then there’s no reason to prefer any sort of socio-politico-economic system. And so we lurch forward. “Forward” defined any way you like, or not. So the question isn’t, “Why are some people trapped in misery and poverty” but rather, “I notice some people aren’t trapped in misery and poverty, how can we make it so more people aren’t miserable?” And then we identify policies that are associated with lack of misery, and implement them. Simple, really.

14

At a population level, some populations have better genetic endowment, are more resourceful, have created or stumbled upon better social mechanisms, live in area of greater natural resource, or some other similar advantage, including the historical niche inside of which they exist.

At an individual level it’s a total crapshoot–blind luck of conception and birth circumstance.

Humans are no different than any other organism. One octopus baby is snarfed up by the first fish that comes along and the next one is king of the reef. You are looking for Reason where there is no evidence that any exists.

When the Big Comet comes, or Global Warming finishes heating up, we’re all goners.

You are not the first one to stumble upon this anxiety, btw.

15

What we have here is another OP on my behalf that pretty much bombs. I guess I didn’t really know what I was looking for with this thread - maybe I just wanted to show some compassion and find out how many other people felt the same way. Not too many, from the looks of it. I liked Lemur’s post, by the way, I guess that’s about as close as I’m going to get to an answer. Seems like a practical enough way of looking at it.

16

I wouldn’t look at it as failed, or as if people don’t have compassion.

I’ll take myself as an example; on a real-life, one-on-one basis, I’ve got a lot of compassion. I’m not going to enumerate my good deeds or anything, but take it on faith.

However, anything that I do in the short-term is tempered with the acceptance that there is always going to be bad shit going down for people somewhere. There always has, and always will. And so, it gets hard to get too worked up over every piece of bad news that comes across my doorstep; if I did, I’d be so overwhelmed I’d live in a state of misery.

Emotionally, I am most compelled to help those who suffer who I know, or who live in my community (in the narrow sense; the more broad the sense of community, the less emotionally tied I am to people’s suffering within that community).

Philosophically, as I stated above, bad things will happen. I’m not going to get too worked up about the general fact that people suffer.

If I can ease suffering in the moment, that’s great, but I wouldn’t ever kid myself that I was ending suffering, just easing it for the time being.

17

perhaps you think it failed BECAUSE of the “lack of compassion”? If so, is it simply that you were, perhaps, trying to raise your faith in humanity by getting a bunch of “man, that sucks, i wish we could help everybody!!!eleventy!!” sort of answers?

I mean, really. It’s simply impossible to eliminate human suffering. When the white man was the one downtrodden, islamic culture and science kicked our asses. back in the day, Asia had things Europe could barely fathom. When life started, well, Africa won by default!

You want a more concrete answer than luck?
Any particular human’s conditions are determined by resources available, environmental factors, and social factors. Those with control of the resources generally have better control of environmental factors (less hungry, less exposure, etc.) and those with better resources also don’t feel the need to compete for them nearly as much, hence less warfare. Additionally, I suppose you could factor in culture. For some inane reason, people in some places hate people from other areas, almost always without cause. These patterns also shift vastly over time.

Any particular person’s condition? Do you think it’s anything other than luck? what would you have it be? Karma from a previous life? Divine whimsy? If you’re going for anything other than a pity party, than feel free to join in.

18

We’re aggressive, violent apes. Frankly I’m surprised we’ve made it this far.

19

Human suffering is the result of original sin, the corruption of human nature by evil forces. As to why that suffering varies so widely, human beings vary widely in all parameters. Such is necessary for a species to have free will. If all human beings had exactly the same physical shape it would be an entirely constrained world (not to mention a boring one); likewise if all human beings had identical experiences in life.

Now as to why the variations in circumstances are so huge, it goes back to original sin again. The Bible says–and Lord Acton agrees–that it’s in the nature of the world that evil people tend to rise in society, and good people fall to the bottom of the social ladder. Evil people by definition will take as much material gain for themselves as they can, and to take it by the most direct method, which is to steal it from those who are powerless to resist. Hence a society, once established, continually resdistributes material wealth is increasingly unbalanced ways.

You may howl at the unfairness of it all, but remember that at the basic metaphysical level all human beings are in the same boat. Every human being has already been granted two amazing gifts: existence and the possibility of salvation. Further, ever human being is a sinner and therefore cannot achieve total happiness during life on Earth. Thus all people actually lie in a fairly narrow band on the scale of happiness, at least before they die. As Chesterton wrote:

Not that the wdiespread wings of wrong brood o’er a moaning Earth,
Not from the cling curse of gold, the random lot of birth,
Not from the misery of the weak, the madness of the strong
Goes upward from our lips the cry: “How long, o Lord, How Long!”
Not only from the huts of toil, the dens of sin and shame,
From lordly halls and peaceful homes the cry goes up the same.
Deep in the heart of every man, where’er his life be spent
There is a noble weariness, a holy discontent.