We aren’t born equal.
We never have been, not humans or any other animals. Among species that birth in litters, the baby that leaves the womb largest has a lifelong advantage. In the modern world, where a baby happens to be born dictates its future prospects to a huge degree. Maybe it’ll be born in the United States, instantly reaping the benefits of citizenship. Or maybe it’ll be born into a war-torn nation, amidst strife caused by climate change… which was itself caused by the creation of wealth and prosperity for all those U.S. babies.
And we use our initial advantages to further tilt the scales. The largest mammal in a litter pushes the others aside and takes the most milk. The rich get richer.
The same principal holds true in astrophysics. The more dense a black hole, the better it will be at grabbing additional matter. Densely-arrayed galaxies will keep their neighbors longest: because empty space expands, the rate at which stars drift away from each other depends upon their initial separation. The farther away you are, the faster you will recede. The lonely become lonelier.
But we are blessed. Through the vagaries of evolution, humans stumbled into complex language. We can sit and contemplate the world; we can consciously strive to be better than nature.
We can read Calvin and Hobbes and think, “Hey, that’s not fair!”
It is perfectly natural for Moe to get the truck. He is bigger, after all. He is stronger. In the world’s initial inequalities of distribution, physical prowess determined who would reap plenty and who would starve. After all, not all territories are equivalently bountiful for hunters or gatherers. Now we have sheets of paper that ostensibly carve up the world amongst us, but in past eras raw violence would’ve staked claims. Human mythology brims with accounts of battle to gain access to the best resources… and we humans still slaughter each other whenever insufficient strength seems to back the legitimacy of those papers.
When the threat of contract-enforcing state violence in Syria waned, local murder began. And we lack an international state threatening violence against individual nations – inspired partly by the desire for resources, George W. Bush initiated a campaign of murder against Iraq.
Except when we’ve banded together to suppress individual violence (the state as Voltron), the strong take from the weak.
At least we know it’s wrong.
We’ve allowed other forms of bullying and theft to slip by. After all, differing physical prowess is only one of the many ways in which we are born unequal. If it is wrong for the strongest individual to steal from others, is it also wrong for the most clever to do the same?
From Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction:
But the real problem came from a nasty feeling I started to have in my stomach. I had grown accustomed to playing in these oceans of currency, bonds, and equities, the trillions of dollars flowing through international markets. But unlike the numbers in my academic models, the figures in my models at the hedge fund stood for something. They were people’s retirement funds and mortgages. In retrospect, this seems blindingly obvious. And of course, I knew it all along, but I hadn’t truly appreciated the nature of the nickels, dimes, and quarters that we pried loose with our mathematical tools. It wasn’t found money, like nuggets from a mine or coins from a sunken Spanish galleon. This wealth was coming out of people’s pockets. For hedge funds, the smuggest of the players on Wall Street, this was “dumb money.”
…
… the math was directed against the consumer as a smoke screen. Its purpose was only to optimize short-term profits for the sellers. And those sellers trusted that they’d manage to unload the securities before they exploded. Smart people would win. And dumber people, the providers of dumb money, would wind up holding billions (or trillions) of unpayable IOUs. … Very few people had the expertise and the information required to know what was actually going on statistically, and most of the people who did lacked the integrity to speak up.
O’Neil was right to feel queasy – after all, she had become Moe. All the high-frequency traders – who are lauded as brilliant despite often doing no more than intercepting others’ orders, buying desired products a millisecond before anyone else can, and re-selling them at a profit – are simply thieves. Sometimes they are stealing because they are more clever. Other times, they are stealing because their pre-existing wealth allows them to buy access to lower-latency computer servers than anyone else.
In any case, Calvin would disapprove.
Thankfully, O’Neil quit stealing (although she doesn’t mention returning her prior spoils). After all, that is part of our blessing – we cannot change the past, but…
… and here it’s worth mentioning that Ludwig Wittgenstein was clearly incorrect when he wrote that “One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief. If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely’, it would not have any significant first person present indicative.” Most physicists believe in free will and the mutability of the future, despite also knowing that, according to the laws of physics, their beliefs should be false…
… we can always fix the future.
(As a special treat – here is one of the most beautiful comic strips about opening your eyes to change.)
Frank Brown Cloud 