Yeah, this is long. You’ve been warned.
If you haven’t read The Crossing, this is a good time.
The Layman’s Summary
• I might be a hypocrite.
• We want great people; lots of different great people.
• Arguing rarely leads to agreement.
• Classes make bastards into leaders.
• Be yourself, even if it doesn’t pay as much as being someone else.
• If you’re whining about your opportunities, shrug and be gone.
• Fierce independence can be very good; or it can be like Golem.
• We are all on the same side, in the same family. Try not to forget that.
“Vizzini said to go back to the beginning…”
People like stories that look through their own eyes. I am not unique in enjoying the same thing. I liked the The Fountainhead because it was one of those rare books where someone like me was the protagonist. It’s also why I liked Ender’s Game. They were both about someone like me. Atlas Shrugged was not. If that’s all, then maybe I’m more closed-minded than I think I am. Or maybe there’s more to it.
When I first started thinking about this, I was wondering if I was a hypocrite. That’s about the worst slur I can hurl at someone. It means that whatever it is that you believe, you don’t believe in it enough for it to apply to you and to everyone else, as well. So, am I a hypocrite? Maybe.
The Merchant and the Soldier in Service
I like the military and I have always been fascinated by warrior cultures. Many of the greatest warriors that ever lived grew up in the martial societies around the world. Many of the greatest merchants that ever existed grew up in ours.
Do we want fewer great warriors or great merchants? No. But we also want great artists, great scientists, great healers of body and mind, great scholars, great farmers, great educators, great crafters, and great peace makers. We want great people. Those different people take very different paths from each other.
Memories
I remember talking to a classmate three or four years ago. He was complaining to the class that his uncle, who had earned two Ph.Ds, received a very large salary and was close to moving into a higher tax bracket. His uncle (and thus my classmate) was quite angry about this. He said that his uncle had “worked for everything that he had. F&$% those people. They didn’t earn it.” Why should he have to give more to the government than someone else who didn’t work as hard?
I rarely come up with answers to questions like that very quickly. It usually takes me a little time because I want to be fair. But this answer almost flew out of me before I had a chance to check it. I said (if my memory serves), “That’s the problem right there. You think that the guy on Wall Street making $300K/year is working harder than the coal miner making $30K/year. Yeah, there are lazy shits, but they’re in both places and there are fewer of them than the guys who bust their asses every day just to break even.”
To this he answered, “So what? Should we just pay them the same and redistribute the wealth?” That’s one of those catch phrases. It’s like asking if you want to socialize something or put toxins in your children’s food. There’s no “correct” answer you can give to the person asking the question.
I replied, “It doesn’t have to be like that. Society values their contributions and therefore their compensations differently, which is reasonable. I don’t know how it should work, but isn’t it obnoxious to think that there’s no suitable answer in the middle that takes both situations into account?”
And that’s where the conversation ended. I think class started. He didn’t bring it up again and, out of courtesy, neither did I.
Cache Rewards
What’s wrong with elevating the martial class? It rewards you for being more willing to kill your neighbor than your neighbor is willing to kill you. You are rewarded, in a developed society, for being able to take the lives of other citizens, without much or any guilt, in order to support or advance your own reputation and position, regardless of their age or innocence.
What’s wrong with elevating the merchant class? It rewards you for being more willing to scalp your neighbor than your neighbor is willing to scalp you. You are rewarded, in a developed society, for being able to take the resources of other citizens, without much or any guilt, in order to support or advance your own wealth and position, regardless of their age or innocence. You are rewarded for being more willing than any other to break the social contract, a contract that you rely upon in order for you and those you love to continue to exist.
What is common between them is a simple point: People in elevated positions, particularly when a modest investment (in time, labor, or capital, for example) has yielded great reward, tend to understandably think themselves unique. This creates an artificially inflated sense of self-worth that is unconnected to reality. It is for this reason that, whenever society elevates a class, it is the biggest bastards in that class that are elevated most swiftly. Because when status is largely inherited, the common man must often be ruthless in order to distinguish himself.
Typology and Clearing the “Air”… of Righteousness
Here’s the thing. Hank Rearden did not invent Rearden steel. He financed and marketed it. He wasn’t brilliant because he invented a new kind of steel. That’s not what his brain did. Few great samurai made their own swords. And few great merchants made their own products or performed their own services.
Hank Rearden was brilliant because he recognized the value of a product created by a character that doesn’t even show up in the story; probably an equally brilliant yet under-appreciated crafter. This “maker” class individual (almost certainly an INTJ) probably made enormous sacrifices to time, flesh, psyche, and family in order to create this material, but could not have sold it on his own.
In case it isn’t obvious, classes are closely connected to the temperaments that dominate them. I’ll go into more depth with this in a future post (keep an eye out for Personality Sudoku) but I think we can all take for granted that the kind of person one typically finds loudly arguing the cost of a government contract in a board room is a little different from the sniper quietly reporting enemy troop movements, who is himself a little different from the guy designing a new rifle. There are similarities and overlaps, but at their core, each of these classes favors a slightly different kind of person.
Under-appreciated
Many members of our merchant class subscribe to the material in Atlas Shrugged, angrily threatening to stop doing what it is that they do for us all. There are strong opinions about this on all sides. Here’s mine:
If you feel that your contribution is so under-appreciated, that your compensation for that contribution is yet less than sufficient for the work that you do, then shrug. Set it all down and go. If you feel the work that you do is not as important to you as your compensation for the work, go. In the absence of knights and samurai, there will be a period of shock, vulnerability, and social predation. And then a class of person will arise to fill that niche without any of the previous class’s sense of entitlement.
And in the absence of entrepreneurs and corporate bankers, there may be a period of tumult, uncertainty, and economic predation. But from that will rise a class of merchant who understands the relationship between work and wealth as well as the value of the consumer, without any sense of entitlement regarding the scale or scope of their contribution.
And society may well be better for it. Or maybe the entitled can make that transition on their own. History, however, would suggest not.
Our Culture of Independence
Elevation raises the noble and the bastard alike. I speak now only of the best of them, as talking to (and of) the bastards is unproductive.
Like anyone, our great merchants have their character challenges, but by and large they rate the respect they are given. Many have worked hard (incredibly hard), struggled against the odds, and taken great risks to accomplish what they have. I would ask them, however, to look at the scientists and engineers who built CERN, at the men and women of Doctors Without Borders, and at the kinds of people you’ve never heard of who struggle against the yoke day after day without the chance that their investment will ever matter. Which of them rates less respect? Which of them does not struggle, fiercely independent?
That fierce independence is an important and fundamental aspect of our culture. However, allowed to run without restraint, fierce independence can easily become irrational solipsism. The inherent problem with a monoscopic view of the world is that when people are irrational or illogical, they are not prone to become rational or logical when faced with reason, but rather become more irrational and more illogical. Talking to people who are unwilling to be rational is like trying to talk to Golem about jewelry. So let’s all be reasonable.
And Now Back to Me
So Atlas drops his burden, as if he were the only Titan in challenge, as if no one else’s burden mattered. If Atlas is your Titan, Prometheus could be said to be mine. That comes with certain gifts, certain perks. Not many, but a few.
In addition to this brain, for no particular reason, I also came out middle class, male, and heterosexual, which comes with a pretty nice set of opportunities. I have an easier time at certain challenges in life than people who aren’t any of those things. Some things could have been better, certainly, but they could also have been much much worse. I do what I can to make those opportunities matter and to help make up for others who didn’t have them since, taken in isolation, these characteristics are meaningless.
If society gave you an unfair allotment of opportunities, then you owe an equivalent debt of opportunity back into society. If you are too stupid or arrogant to recognize that you received an unfair allotment of opportunities, then you should be compelled to return more, as you have likely otherwise skipped over almost every other opportunity in your life to do some good.
You might wonder who you’re helping. In the military, you move at the pace of the slowest person. That tends to be one of three people: the guy dragging ass, the guy carrying a machine gun, or the guy who is wounded. You don’t want to reward the lazy guy. You want to turn him into someone useful. And you don’t want to punish the guy doing more than anyone else. You want to help him since he’s doing so much extra. And you can’t leave the injured guy behind. For a thousand possible reasons, people just get hurt (in the military, often doing what you asked of them). Which of these people do you design your society for?
All of them.
Many of the people I talk about here subscribe to the Bible, a colorful series of stories that sits on my shelf near The Koran and The Field Guide to Meat. Perhaps this passage (which seeded my work on The Cell) will make my point clear:
1st Corinthians, Chapter 12
12 For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.
Which is an interesting way of saying, “The needs of the many are in common with the needs of the few.”
Take care of each other.
-CG
Post Script: As usual with these larger posts (Leonardo’s Bridge and Free Ideas), I left a great deal of material out, including many arguments and examples. If you take issue with anything here, by all means raise your concern. I may be wrong. Or I may have thought about your point but left out the discussion of it. I’d be happy to share my specific thoughts and I’d be interested to hear yours, even if I disagree.