MyDoorsAreOpen
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2003
- Messages
- 8,549
"Sorry to fleece you, but I have to eat too!" -- Compassion and trust in lean times
I vividly remember boarding a freelance intercity mini-bus in Kunming, China in 2002. After I'd settled in, a passenger caught the owner and operator trying to cheat him on the fare / baggage fees, and gave him a tongue lashing. I simply remember the humiliated owner yelling back at him, "I have to eat too, you know!" Those were the days when China was just getting on its feet as an economic power, and not nearly everyone in its vast population shared equally in the wealth (still true). Since coming back to the US, I'm seeing this kind of thing play out more and more here as well. I've long maintained that most of my country (USA)'s problems have their root in its deindustrialization. We have a very large population, and too few jobs that pay a living wage. I've reflected on this a lot, and how this creates an environment of scarcity that undermines a lot of the ideals we Americans cherish and pass along intergenerationally as sources of motivation and strength.
My wife and I are somewhat fortunate to have jumped aboard two of a small handful of growth industries, which are protected merely by the impracticality of offshoring them: non-compulsory education and healthcare, respectively. (The other big one in this category is food.) It's not an accident that commercial TV airtime and billboards in the US are increasingly dominated by paid messages from private universities, cram school chains, hospital groups, pharmaceutical companies, and restaurant franchises. Recent MBA graduates, have zeroed in on these industries as the only ones likely to remain profitable for the foreseeable future, and have hired themselves out to them to help them maximize their profits, even if that means cheating consumers and gaming the system. I say "somewhat fortunate" with no small amount of chagrin -- she became a teacher and I became a doctor in order to help people, not exploit them. It chafes at both of our moral fibers the subtle ways each of us are gently prodded each day into contributing to a system that tricks people into paying exorbitant amounts of money they can't afford.
That said, we have to eat too. We are the parents of naturally-conceived triplets, living by circumstance in a location with very high costs of living. We have a responsibility to provide our children the best possible future, and with the uncertainty of the future economy, that means saving. Seeing as how colleges are one of the key offenders in this wholesale fleecing of the US middle class, I'm not even sure it's going to be possible to save enough to borrow for (let alone pay cash for) three four-year college tuitions at once in 2029. Sure, I could probably find a way, if I played my cards right, to practice medicine in a way that brought in seven figures a year. But at what price? (My soul, my free time, my life, and my integrity, to name a few.)
Countless times recently I've noticed merchants large and small try to pull a bit more off of me than they'd originally said they would. Their artfulness ranges from the clever and grudgingly respectable (mechanics high-balling the number of "hours" it took them to fix my car) to the provocatively shameless (going to court and successfully overturning an unfair traffic ticket, only to be hit with a "court fee" more than half of the fine I would have paid for the ticketed offense). My reaction to these and similar incidents is a source of great cognitive dissonance for me. On the one hand I am outraged at the unfairness of being target for exploitation. I understand it's nothing personal, but at the same time, if the Golden Rule is true, so is its contrapositive: If I make a concerted effort not to treat others a certain way, it makes it harder to take when others treat me that way. On the other hand, I recognize that these are lean times for all of us collectively, and I empathize with the temptation to try to take a little more from your clients than is fair and square. I get it: compared to our heyday as a manufacturing juggernaut, there just isn't enough to go around, and we're all just doing what we can to survive.
I'm a hopeless liberal progressive. I plan to spend the rest of my career and my life coming up with solutions, both for individuals and for the system (if it'll listen) for managing resources more wisely, so as to minimize inequality and exploitation, and the resultant loss of social trust, community, and ultimately societal stability. For example, I tell a lot of my patients, "My aim is to keep you out of the hospital. Because unless you're very rich or very poor, the average American hospital will do its best to shake you down for as much as you're worth, and whatever insurance you think you have will make any excuse to ensure it's you, not them, who pays." By being advocates for their own health and taking simple steps to keep themselves healthier, patients not only boycott a system that just might fleece them, but also enjoy better quality of life and have more to contribute to their communities.
There are those who'll say (descriptively, not proscriptively) that material scarcity inevitably rends communities apart with violence, and that this is a basic fact of life about which nothing can be done. (Yes, I've read Jared Diamond and his and others' exegesis of what ruined Easter Island.) But the US is not nearly to that point. As of now, our country still commands a large amount of resources of many kinds, which could be better managed and distributed before we're really completely out of something vital.
It would be far too easy to "come to the dark side" of libertarianism (or conservatism), and solve this conflict the quick and dirty way by deciding I'm going to just look out for me and mine, and advocate for others to do the same. But I have seen no evidence that this leads to a happier, healthier, more connected, more collaborative citizenry in practice. If you want to get deeper, I'm not sure what the object of this game called life is, but all the signs I've read have consistently told me it's got something to do with transcending one's base nature as a selfish animal and realizing one's place as a part of some greater plan, by being compassionate to others and overcoming the alienation of being an individual.
For those of you who relate to my desire to remain giving, compassionate, a good citizen, and capable of trust, but not a sitting duck for others' exploitation, what do you find is the best approach for dealing with (both internally and externally) people trying to cheat you when times are lean?
I vividly remember boarding a freelance intercity mini-bus in Kunming, China in 2002. After I'd settled in, a passenger caught the owner and operator trying to cheat him on the fare / baggage fees, and gave him a tongue lashing. I simply remember the humiliated owner yelling back at him, "I have to eat too, you know!" Those were the days when China was just getting on its feet as an economic power, and not nearly everyone in its vast population shared equally in the wealth (still true). Since coming back to the US, I'm seeing this kind of thing play out more and more here as well. I've long maintained that most of my country (USA)'s problems have their root in its deindustrialization. We have a very large population, and too few jobs that pay a living wage. I've reflected on this a lot, and how this creates an environment of scarcity that undermines a lot of the ideals we Americans cherish and pass along intergenerationally as sources of motivation and strength.
My wife and I are somewhat fortunate to have jumped aboard two of a small handful of growth industries, which are protected merely by the impracticality of offshoring them: non-compulsory education and healthcare, respectively. (The other big one in this category is food.) It's not an accident that commercial TV airtime and billboards in the US are increasingly dominated by paid messages from private universities, cram school chains, hospital groups, pharmaceutical companies, and restaurant franchises. Recent MBA graduates, have zeroed in on these industries as the only ones likely to remain profitable for the foreseeable future, and have hired themselves out to them to help them maximize their profits, even if that means cheating consumers and gaming the system. I say "somewhat fortunate" with no small amount of chagrin -- she became a teacher and I became a doctor in order to help people, not exploit them. It chafes at both of our moral fibers the subtle ways each of us are gently prodded each day into contributing to a system that tricks people into paying exorbitant amounts of money they can't afford.
That said, we have to eat too. We are the parents of naturally-conceived triplets, living by circumstance in a location with very high costs of living. We have a responsibility to provide our children the best possible future, and with the uncertainty of the future economy, that means saving. Seeing as how colleges are one of the key offenders in this wholesale fleecing of the US middle class, I'm not even sure it's going to be possible to save enough to borrow for (let alone pay cash for) three four-year college tuitions at once in 2029. Sure, I could probably find a way, if I played my cards right, to practice medicine in a way that brought in seven figures a year. But at what price? (My soul, my free time, my life, and my integrity, to name a few.)
Countless times recently I've noticed merchants large and small try to pull a bit more off of me than they'd originally said they would. Their artfulness ranges from the clever and grudgingly respectable (mechanics high-balling the number of "hours" it took them to fix my car) to the provocatively shameless (going to court and successfully overturning an unfair traffic ticket, only to be hit with a "court fee" more than half of the fine I would have paid for the ticketed offense). My reaction to these and similar incidents is a source of great cognitive dissonance for me. On the one hand I am outraged at the unfairness of being target for exploitation. I understand it's nothing personal, but at the same time, if the Golden Rule is true, so is its contrapositive: If I make a concerted effort not to treat others a certain way, it makes it harder to take when others treat me that way. On the other hand, I recognize that these are lean times for all of us collectively, and I empathize with the temptation to try to take a little more from your clients than is fair and square. I get it: compared to our heyday as a manufacturing juggernaut, there just isn't enough to go around, and we're all just doing what we can to survive.
I'm a hopeless liberal progressive. I plan to spend the rest of my career and my life coming up with solutions, both for individuals and for the system (if it'll listen) for managing resources more wisely, so as to minimize inequality and exploitation, and the resultant loss of social trust, community, and ultimately societal stability. For example, I tell a lot of my patients, "My aim is to keep you out of the hospital. Because unless you're very rich or very poor, the average American hospital will do its best to shake you down for as much as you're worth, and whatever insurance you think you have will make any excuse to ensure it's you, not them, who pays." By being advocates for their own health and taking simple steps to keep themselves healthier, patients not only boycott a system that just might fleece them, but also enjoy better quality of life and have more to contribute to their communities.
There are those who'll say (descriptively, not proscriptively) that material scarcity inevitably rends communities apart with violence, and that this is a basic fact of life about which nothing can be done. (Yes, I've read Jared Diamond and his and others' exegesis of what ruined Easter Island.) But the US is not nearly to that point. As of now, our country still commands a large amount of resources of many kinds, which could be better managed and distributed before we're really completely out of something vital.
It would be far too easy to "come to the dark side" of libertarianism (or conservatism), and solve this conflict the quick and dirty way by deciding I'm going to just look out for me and mine, and advocate for others to do the same. But I have seen no evidence that this leads to a happier, healthier, more connected, more collaborative citizenry in practice. If you want to get deeper, I'm not sure what the object of this game called life is, but all the signs I've read have consistently told me it's got something to do with transcending one's base nature as a selfish animal and realizing one's place as a part of some greater plan, by being compassionate to others and overcoming the alienation of being an individual.
For those of you who relate to my desire to remain giving, compassionate, a good citizen, and capable of trust, but not a sitting duck for others' exploitation, what do you find is the best approach for dealing with (both internally and externally) people trying to cheat you when times are lean?