October 4, 2006
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the total value of human activity
We look at all the things that people do from day to
day, the things they produce, the services they provide and then we add
em up and produce a number so that we can do math on it, basically.Not all human activity is created equal. But luckily our number is built in
relative to individual opinions of what the value of that activity is of
course. If a good or service is worth more to people then they will pay more
for it and so it will contribute more to our good old magic number.But we know opinions can be flawed. We know money can be wasted. We know very
well that a person can be manipulated into seeing more value in a good or
service than they would otherwise have felt and ironically as a consequent
people pay lots of money into goods and services whose sole purpose is to enact
that deceipt, to get people to expend wealth on things that are not as valuable
to them as they think they are during the one irrational moment when they make
the choice. This too contributes to the number.If we were to wonder at the age old question of why we are
here, now, in this place at this time very few of us would ultimately come up
with the answer: “to convince other people to buy junk” so we can say at least
on one level there are certain contributors to the equation that have a sort of
lesser order of significance than others in the context of the greater human
endeavor.But individuals are taught, no demanded of to think only of
“their own happiness”. The story is you carve out some niche place in the
world, go on doing whatever you feel like for a living day in and day out,
spend time with your family, go on vacations, have fun when you can, enjoy your
work as best you can (if not what you are doing, at least enjoy the people with
whom you are doing it and your own ability to excel in it) and so on. Also, you
can do good things for your friends and family and maybe a charity or two in
your spare time. A Christmas gift. A birthday present. A donation for relief to
victims of a Tsunami or Hurricane. And so on.And then you have children. Raise them as best you can. Help
them be as good a people as they can be. Create an environment as best you can
that is as pleasant as possible for them. And teach them, also, to go about
their lives striving only as far as their inherent limitations and the
boundaries of the system in which they live. Most of all hope they are happy.Then you get old and you retire and mostly just try to get
out of everybody’s way. Try to make the people you know’s life happier when you
can and not cause them any hardship when you can’t. And then you die.Under this system, it is even entirely possible to do a
life’s work that is actually net harmful to the system and the world and still
feel entirely good about your own life and feel completed as a human being. All
you need to do is to ensure that your life’s work enables you to live happily,
have children, do good things in your spare time, be a conscientious citizen
and then get sufficiently out of the way in the end. But your *job* could be drug dealing or
working for a fictitious company, or working for a company that is destroying
the environment for future generation or any number of a hundred things
provided no one realizes the harm or the harm though known can be sufficiently
hidden from the mind so that we might go about our daily lives without having
it plague us. Even if your life’s work does not result in net harm, it is
certainly possible that you can live your life without doing very much
measurable good at all really. For example you could work for a telemarketing
firm. And you needn’t worry, your work will still contribute to the global
magic numbers, and politicians will still use that conclusion to say to other
politicians their nation is better than another.One wonders where such a system came from. IF we think,
purely abstractly, of what is the purpose of *human* existence and what is the
value of *human* activity we do not conclude that We
conclude that if humanity is to mean anything it minimally must be concerned
with its continued survival. More to the point we care about a lot more than
that. We care about growing as a species, getting broader and deeper and
learning more and creating great works and wondrous works and accomplishing
extraordinary things and expanding our civilization above and beyond our
wildest hopes and dreams. When we think abstractly about why we are here we
never come up with a real answer but we do fairly quickly settle upon the
things that we want to achieve and what we would like to be our future as a
species. It isn’t persistent perpetuation in random drudgery provided we are
all sufficiently “happy”.Don’t get me wrong. I
think we want the happiness and the peace too. It’s just that we all want the stories on top
of that . We want to be able to tell our children and grandchildren about the
great things our species has done and we want to see our children and grand children
do extraordinary things. We want to die knowing that humanity will prosper and
grow and that the universe will never forget that there was once a species dwelling
upon a little planet called Earth striving to become.To these ends though, you’d think all human endeavor would
be focused upon building the human experience. Growing it. Making it greater. Instead of not caring when people
choose life’s works that serve no purpose or do harm, we would do all that we can
to get as many people as we can choosing to create goods and engage in services
that contribute to humanity and that make us better. Rather than trying to
create a passive controllable populace willing and able to do only just enough
to get by and survive, we would strive to harness all of the human potential
and push it toward maximal greatness. We would thrive to ensure that we all
grow and learn and achieve and live lives that are not just pleasant but filled
with a feeling of fulfillment because we know that are actions have contributed
to something bigger and greater than ourselves. Humanity’s potential.So whenever I hear about economic magic numbers I always
wonder, how valuable is that money we are referring to? How well is it being
spent? Are our goods and services pointless wastes of human energy or are they
meaningful contributors to the greatness of our species? And I wonder, always, how far can we go, how
much can we achieve if we focus all of human will and all of human commitment
together to the ends of improving our species? With all of the people and all
of the potential in the world I strongly believe that the possibilities far
exceed our wildest imaginations.If we are to make our existence great and our existence
worthy of remembrance we must become serious about making our mission as a
people to be the human endeavor itself. If we can do that we may even be able
to save our species from ourselves.
