The Lottery of Birth Flashcards
The lottery of birth is a philosophical argument which states that since no one chooses the circumstances into which they are born, people should not be held responsible for them (being rich, being poor, etc.)
The lottery of birth argument has been used by philosophers such John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. More modern day uses have been prompted by political theorists such as John Rawls, who explores the subject in depth in his book ‘A Theory of Justice’.
Everybody is brought up with the same founding, justifying, centralising myths. All classes have them, all groups subscribe to them and they’re always wrong.
We do not choose to exist. We do not choose what environment we will grow up in. The lives that we lead, the beliefs and values that we hold owe much to the lottery of our birth.
Our starting point in life is reliance on forces over which we have no control.
BIRTH
Long before we can shape the world, the world has firmly shaped us. But what we are shaped into is no accident.
We have evolved to pay attention to our parents. We’re all born almost fully fledged as citizens, as members of a particular class and citizens of a particular country, believing that it’s the only way it can be and will always be.
But the context in which we are born is one which has been highly engineered by particular political and economic forces.
We tend to accept the background assumptions, the values of the culture that we’re born into. People like to believe things that put the group they belong to in a good light. Everyone thinks they’re on the side of the angels.
One thing that effectively blinds us to our own role in the world and to examining our own beliefs is patriotism (or indeed any adherence to a pre-established set of beliefs).
Patriotism has a particularly effective role in preventing us from knowing ourselves. It is a powerful force in blinding us to certain realities.
It’s a great tragedy that we’re apt to believe our own self-serving story, to sincerely believe that we see reality as it is.
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. “ George Orwell
History suggests that there is neither a belief too bizarre nor an action too appalling for humans to embrace, given the necessary cultural influences. This idea has profound implications for our personal and political freedom. In an important sense, we are not born free.
In fact, to take our freedom for granted is to extinguish the possibility of attaining it.
EDUCATION
You can view education in one of two ways:
1/ The process by which people arrive at the capacity to utilise their skills and talents maximally to enrich their lives - a positive view of education
2/ The process which prepares people to fit positions in society. It gives them the identities, the inclinations, the expectations that are consistent with the positions.
The second is inevitable but you want the first. But we don’t have societal structures and positions which align to the first way. Therefore, schools teach you to endure boredom, to take orders and to obey.
Systems of education must prioritise certain ideas, facts and behaviour over others. These priorities tell us much about the dominant values and goals of a society.
If you talk about atrocities committed in the colonial period by the British Empire most people would just stare at you blankly. They have no idea what you’re talking about. If you talk about Stalin‘s atrocities, they’re fully apprised of those. But Lord Lytton, in India, probably killed as many people as Stalin did, by very similar methods, exporting grain in the midst of a famine, huge, huge quantities of grain, often from places where there was a surplus of production, a very successful harvest, and engineered a famine in which tens of millions of people died. But we hear nothing of this. We know nothing of this.
Schooling can’t be politically neutral because it’s preparing people to play a role in society. And roles in society are not politically neutral because they affect the distribution of power. It’s either preparing you to empower those who already have power, or increasing their authority, or the distribution of their ideas, or by increasing their wealth. Now, if you’re trained to serve them, then you’ve been trained to play a political role. If you’re trained to pursue your own vision, to develop your own vision first and then pursue it, then that’s a political role also.
In the 1960s, in the United States, there was, of course, like most places in the world, an upheaval, a gigantic social upheaval of resistance and opposition to the past, to the structures of capital and power, that existed in society. The government, of course, the elites confronted a problem. They didn’t want this to recur.
In 1973, at the behest of billionaire David Rockefeller, an organisation known as the Trilateral Commission was founded. Its early members were drawn from the United States, western Europe, and Japan. Among them were the heads of major corporations, banks, law firms, and government. Concerned about their resistance since the early ’60s, the Commission set out to investigate its root causes. Their report was entitled The Crisis of Democracy.
And this Commission did an investigation focusing on education and on school systems because, of course, so much of the activity occurred on campuses. And they actually came up with a conclusion. It wasn’t the totality of the reasons for the ’60s, but it’s quite revealing. And it was one of the reasons.
What they said was the population was being over-educated. That’s an incredible kind of idea. And, yet, it’s accurate. They were saying—and they were very clear on this—that we were educating people enough, so that they actually expected to have a life, so that they expected to have a degree of control when they got finished with their education. And what they were encountering was their ability to control their own lives was marginal. And people resisted.
And what the Commission decided was that they had to make a change in the educational system. They had to cut back on the high quality education that they had until then—under the pressure of Sputnik and the rest—been spreading through society and, instead, increasing the more regimented education.
The report regarded the education system as the most important value-producing system in society and argued that a programme is necessary to lower the job expectation of those who receive a college education.
Within two years of the report’s publication, all of the top positions in the U.S. government—the office of president, vice president, secretary of state, defence, and treasury—were held by members of the Trilateral Commission. And the national security advisor was its director.
“Passive acceptance of the teacher’s wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.” Bertrand Russell
Education can either free the mind and encourage independent thinking, or it can control the mind and condition the mind and turn you into slaves who voluntarily give up their freedom because they don’t know how else to be or think.
An education that omits what’s needed to understand power thereby protects it.
Most of us will pass through school without a single lesson:
1/ On the roots of inequality
2/ The influence of corporations
3/ The workings of capitalism
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” Paulo Freire
EMPLOYMENT
When employed, we use our time and creativity to serve agendas set by others.
The decisions that professionals make in their work has much more influence on society than the way the vote.
If you look at people’s lives you see that work really is their most important project.
You’re selling the best hours of your life. You’re selling the biggest project in your life.
Professionals are deliberately produced to be intellectually and politically subordinate.
The distinguishing feature is their willingness and ability to maintain ideological discipline in their work.
In any profession, it’s terribly easy to get caught up with the natural everyday logic of pragmatically doing the job, and you fail to stand back and look at the context within which you are doing it. This can lead to years of doing without thinking.
Some nuclear-weapons designers were asked “What is the worst thing about your job?”. These young guys paused to think. Finally they said, “the computers don’t have enough capacity”. This is a perfect illustration of the subordination of professionals. It wasn’t their job or even their interest to question the big picture.
In general, questioning the goal/morality of the work is not considered to be a legitimate part of the work assignment.
Some scientists have the worldview of a petri dish.
To enter the workplace, the rights of the citizen must often be left behind.
The system of education and employment doesn’t require you to internalise its ideology. It just requires you to maintain ideological discipline.
The safest way to survive in the workplace is to internalise that ideology.
Stockholm syndrome - feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim towards a captor.
Ideological conformity is often seen as politically neutral because it’s so common. It’s insidious when people are working night and day to support the status quo are seen as non-political.
A typical workplace demands that we sell more than our time and knowledge. It demands that we sell our obedience.
OBEDIENCE
The worst crimes in history would not have been possible without mass obedience and conformity to the demands of power.
Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.
People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.
Stanley Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.
The “learner” (actor) was strapped to a chair with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the “teacher” (participant) tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.
The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued.
There were four prods and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter read out the next prod, and so on.
Prod 1: Please continue.
Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: You have no other choice but to continue.
Results:
65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.
“The problem of obedience, therefore, is not wholly psychological. The form and shape of society and the way it is developing have much to do with it. Beyond a certain point, the breaking up of society into people carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of overall direction. He yields to authority but in doing so is alienated from his own actions.”
Obedience produces the most destructive forms of disorder: war, poverty and the destruction of our environment.
Freedom has always depended on our ability to identify and overcome systems of arbitrary authority.
Throughout history, principled disobedience has, time and again, served to create a more humane society.
The choice is not whether we obey or disobey but WHAT we obey and disobey.
QUESTIONING
The surface reality of society can often be deceptive. Familiarity can blind us to the oppressive structures shaping our world. The more we’re a product of these structures, the more likely we are to internalise their values and conform to their expectations.
The knowledge we possess and the values we hold emerge from the interaction between our brain’s cognitive architecture and our experiences.
Since there is no politically neutral way to socialise people, the versions of reality we are presented with tend to serve the agendas of those in control.
Our minds are a battleground of competing forces.
The outcome of this battle determines the society we create. To shape these minds is to shape the society.
It’s that unacknowledged control which makes good people do bad things, because they are driven towards certain actions by ideologies they do not know they possess.
Without self-questioning and self-examination, without rigorously testing your own beliefs and your own preconceptions, you can’t meaningfully test those of a society as a whole, but it’s a very painful process. But without it, there is no possibility of progress.
As an individual, you have had a very limited set of experiences. The limitation on your experiences may have then set a limitation on or narrowed your thinking. To recognise the limitations of your personal experience is then to enable you to go beyond those limitations.
The interesting thing about the ideological impact on news coverage is that it’s invisible. It’s embedded in the foundations, taken for granted.
“Man will become better when you show him what he is like” Chekhov
If there is one lesson to be taken from the hours of the 20th century, it is the danger of not questioning.
But we won’t ask a question if we think we already know the answer.
The ideal of science is that you’re always prepared to be in error. The scientific ideal is the professor who stands up after 30 years of working on a theory and says, “This theory is wrong” and be applauded.
The problem with any strong belief is this: if it’s part of your identity it’s very painful to question.
Let’s discuss concepts and ideas without cultural baggage. Let’s promote the joy of learning and seeking truth. Let’s get rid of the notion that changing your mind is a weakness, or a betrayal of your identity.
As our critical faculties develop, it can seem far easier to rationalise what we’ve absorbed by chance than to face the discomfort that comes with questioning.
To question is to value the ideal of truth more highly than the loyalties to our nation, religion, race or ideology - in short, our inherited identity.
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” Arundhati Roy
“Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity.” Max Horkheimer
There’s a sense of passivity and defeat in many people’s minds and in their emotions. It is not something which is intrinsic in the sense that it comes out of a genetic predisposition.
It comes out of the ways in which the social order has succeeded in preying upon their insecurities.
If I asked you to join me in a movement against ageing - the biggest killer - you’d think I was mad.
But this is the same for capitalism. People think it’s just a part of life, it’s a part of existence. You just have to put up with it. This is a function of the educational system, of the positions that we find ourselves in, of the roles and the options that exist in society.
“In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming “This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!” we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.” Richard Feynmann
What is really distinct about human nature is our capacity for self-transformation and for creating a world that we really want.
It’s important to break out of the prison of the monoculture of the mind and to recognise that this world has so many alternatives.
Monoculture (sociology) - A single, homogeneous culture without diversity or dissension.
“Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it take with you your all.”
We must challenge the forces that have shaped who we are and what we do. To identify the limitations on our knowledge, freedom and happiness is to give ourselves the best chance of transcending them.
