The Search for a Fair Society: Making the Case for Fair Equality of Opportunity ft. Self-Generation of Our Reality

October 5. Thank you for stopping by. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society. because without a clearly formulated goal you never get where you want to.

So, fair equality of opportunity means every member of society is given equal chance to develop natural skills and abilities throughout life. That’s exploration. And it just so happens that every person in the society was motivated to adjust their individual models of the world in their mind by using a shared set of data in the generation processes in order to cooperate by the desire to do just that – engage in random searches. It’s the core of the constantly continuing negotiations of the social contract that keeps society alive. We could survive as individuals with full control of our own world generation. But the high-risk random searches represent for an individual keep us from engaging in them – unless we offset this risk by cooperation and thus get access to the highest payoff these searches offer.

Why is it important? Because all material things, including those that came together in the shape of our body, seek both their lowest energy state and to be in equilibrium with their surroundings. It can only happen when we bodily lean into the unknown and explore. Our mind is a tool shaped to optimize this quest e.g. by generating a world that is a representation of the most promising energies for us to engage with, using hypotheticals to figure out what the best might be under the circumstances we are in, giving us a spacetime representation so that we can plan to be in the same spot as the chosen energy, giving us the means to interact with certain energy patterns and cooperate with them in order to randomize our searches for the best energies, and to guide us with feelings that allow us to figure out what we like and dislike i.e. which decisions about energies were in the interest of the material things making up our body and which not so much.

Rawls, like most philosophers, didn’t think in these terms. I think, the philosophers of Ancient Greece, who have shaped Western thinking, did so purposefully as a response to especially the Indian philosophy that was carried into the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor with numerous merchant ships driven by the monsoon winds. But that’s a can of worms that I will not open here. For more on the influence look up William Dalrymple’s new book The Golden Road. But Rawls said that the case for fair equality of opportunity rests in part on its benefits for economic efficiency and growth, in the sense that we can all gain from living in a society where everyone has the same chance to develop their skills and abilities, and to compete for different jobs. That basically is an expression of the idea that random searches lead to the highest payoff, but that this is a payoff only achievable when cooperating.

But Rawls goes on to say that the case for fair equality of opportunity ultimately rests on a more fundamental moral commitment: it’s simply unfair that random circumstances at birth over which we have absolutely no control should have such profound influence over our lives. Therefore, fair equality of opportunity must be promoted irrespective of whether such an initiative will increase economic growth.

What he says is that a human life is not a means to end calculation, it cannot be reduced to the most selfish motivation and hence a bottom line. This reduction impoverishes our public discourse. And it makes us sick. E.g. human mirror. What does it mean. It means when we watch another person peel a banana, 30% of the neurons in our own brain are active that would fire if we peeled a banana. But not just that. Our mirror neurons are also connected to our emotional regions. And since all our emotions lead to a physiological reaction, we pick up the emotions of the other, too, and feel them as our own. Meaning, we include the data of any other person we see in the definition of our self. Emotions are guiding principles and thus shape our goals. Since part of our emotions are the emotions of others we see, part of our goals are actually their goals. So, if we are denied selfless motives of our actions, we recognize that as harm to ourselves, and our mind will struggle.

Any thoughts? Tell me. Tell all. Since our models of the world change with every new information we gather and the models are only accessible to others when we communicate them, we are part of never-ending negotiations that require constant conversation and debate.

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