The Dignity of “No.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.”
Henry David Thoreau – Walden

“When you take a person’s life, you take the most precious thing that person possesses”, according to Harry, Dexter’s father, in the television series “Dexter”, which is about a serial killer who solely targets serial killers. Murder, in this sense, is theft of the life of another or others.

Societies strongly sanction against the murder of their members, as a general rule, except for specific socially sanctioned cases.

It is important to not confuse being “alive” with having “a life.” We require the former to accomplish the latter, but existence, in and of itself, seems to be an inadequate foundation for providing a reason to exist.

Not long ago, others wiser than I offered the following account of our raison d’etre:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Accordingly, to have “a life” is to be free to pursue happiness. To foreshadow, if a person or group steals the freedom or means of others to pursue their happiness, is it a form of murder?

Being mortals of the type we are, on a finite planet, our potential lives are necessarily circumscribed by what is possible, naturally and culturally. Even those of us blessed by fate are born with a relatively small set of possibilities that becomes increasingly smaller as we choose from among different sets of mutually exclusive paths.

Our set of possibilities is relatively small because to successfully conceptualize and actualize our pursuits of happiness, our natural gifts must converge with our cultural circumstances in an environment endowed with the requisite natural resources and Fate must fall in our favour. Our possibilities are constrained to the degree that we lack the requisites in any of these four component areas.

As we are not deities and our access to resources is not limitless, these four factors are affected by how our pursuits align with the pursuits of all those who share in the basket of natural and cultural resources that is available. Our rights to the goods in the basket are limited by the amount of goods in the basket and our power to lay claim to those goods.

I coined the axiom “Rights realization costs resources” to capture this circumstance. It applies to all of our interrelations, from the micro-level of lovers, families, and friends to the macro-level of humanity as a group. Anytime we confront circumstances where we must choose between competing goods or bads, the axiom is being enacted. For example, what did it cost America to go into Iraq? What did America gain? What is America sacrificing and what is it privileging by choosing this bailout strategy over a Krugmanesque strategy? Should a senior forego her medication so that she can eat a healthier diet or visit her grandchildren more often? Should we save for our children’s education or try to enhance their home life? A wage and benefit cut or no job? In this regard, Human Geographers say that in human affairs there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs and compromises.

Our pot of natural and cultural resources is effectively our pot of choices for the pursuit of happiness. The number of available choices can increase or decrease as a direct and cumulative result of our earlier choices, intentional and otherwise.

To return to the Founders, how does one deliver “unalienable rights” when resources are not unlimited? One does not because one cannot. The point of the Founders was not to promise the undeliverable: their point was to focus attention on the legitimacy of the claims of each and every citizen, so that the people were not only apprised of their rights, they were also apprised of their responsibilities to each other. This notion becomes clear when one recognizes that the American system was displacing a system in which the divine rights of kings and aristocrats were writ large.

Within Jeffersonian Democracy, these responsibilities are manifest in civic virtue. Civic virtue, in a republic, is manifest in the desire of citizens to promote social harmony and group well-being; to aid the state, and to avoid and challenge corrupting influences that would lead to the establishment of privileged ruling classes.

Citizens that embody civic virtue temper their claims against each other by following The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The Founders clearly state that it is the shared circumstance of the people that makes it proper that they should care about the rights of others to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Accordingly, it is contrary to the spirit of America’s Constitution to initiate, support, and promote policies that uphold the axiom “Those who have the gold make the rules.”

 How does this relate to choice? Our role in forming our character, as individuals and as groups, is largely a feature of our choices. In an overly simple, but meaningful, sense, who we are and who we want to be is largely determined by our ability to act on our choices. We feel compromised when our circumstances cause us to act contrary to our sense of right. “And being mastered meant the modification of frank and fearless statement by cowardice masquerading as discretion” according to Samuel Clemens, in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Hard economic circumstances often present such tests of character. As we move through this Depression, we will be heartened by the noble and courageous actions we experience or carry out. We will also be disheartened.

I am disheartened now. I am disheartened because I know that the despair that is present and forthcoming is largely the product of the choices of a small group of citizens who believe they deserve a disproportionately large share of the pot of choices.  In acting upon this belief, they not only secure a larger share, they also make the pot smaller overall.

Even given the complex nature of the factors and events that delivered this crash into the twin towers of the economy, it is clear that the acolytes of a cult of self-aggrandizement and intellectual faux couture were the pilots that attacked America’s productive capacity and standing assets. At the heart of things, these pilots are anti-American in spirit. They leverage their rights and they externalize their responsibilities. They are neo-aristocrats.

The bagel thieves, depicted in Stephen Leavitt’s “Freakonomics”, fit here. They are the group that were least likely to pay for their bagels, when the money was collected on the honor system, even when they knew the proprietor. Who are they? They are the senior executives of a large number of large corporations based in Washington. In “Freakonomics”, Leavitt asks a tantalizing question, was it their willingness to thieve and be dishonest that earned them their positions or did they learn to thieve and be dishonest by being in their positions (paraphrased)?

Unfortunately, they ate more than bagels. In effect, they’ve gotten fat on the moral choices of others. Their extravagances were paid for with other peoples’ ability to say no to indecent proposals or to say yes when asked for aid by loved ones. Before all is said and done, by creating this crash, these neo-aristocrats will have stolen the freedom of others to pursue their happiness. Have they murdered the pursuit of happiness of others? The answer to this question will be manifest when “We, the people” are denied the conditions that provide the dignity of saying “Yes” or “No.”