Social narratives and the value we place on others.
“To be brought into this world, to serve others as a thank you, and to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor before passing. Such is the flow of the human life.”
In this piece I take a maxim that the highest human calling is to serve others and examine it from both social and asocial angles. In the end, would we make different decisions in aloneness?
From an optimistic perspective, to serve others is to experience the greatest joy. Seeing your work multiply as others find it useful in their lives is the highest return one can hope for. I experienced this as a teacher. Like a hockey puck graph, I saw exponential returns. When my students got accepted into their top schools and got their dream jobs, when I would see the flicker of light of understanding and connecting in their eyes, I knew that whatever energy I was putting in was now flowing through another being, helping them make intelligent choices. This is why education is so powerful. It not only passes knowledge but changes mindset to the one who seeks a better way through their life.
From a pessimistic perspective, I was exhausted. I could barely pay my bills. I went through 3 program shut downs and 7 jobs in 5 years. The hardest part of it all was that we all knew we were doing something important, yet even the top program in the state had trouble securing funding.
The reformists would say that it’s possible to change this money-first structure by flipping the incentive mechanism. If governments stepped in to guarantee higher wages and stop cutting support for social programs, the benefits would be retained. Even Universal Basic Income stipend would make a different in lives of those who are $7–10 an hour richer than the minimum wage-earners, enough to be considered the middle class, but are only one missed paycheck or emergency away from falling into poverty.
But what if the strong social net is not enough? What if the whole system needs to scrapped. The rebels blame cooperative structures for creating dependance and making us weak. True creativity, they say, comes from overcoming challenges on one’s own. Only when everyone strives for personal excellence can we move forward as a society. Only when everyone reaches their own highest standard, can we all rise. So, above all we should protect freedom.
Yet all of these views are rooted in social realities. In what we value. What if the social element was removed out of the situation. If you were alone in a forest knowing you were not going to encounter another human unless you had to put in more effort than you would finding food, yet you were comfortable and in no danger, how would you value another human being and their contribution?
