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"Sorry to fleece you, but I have to eat too!" -- Compassion and trust in lean times

MyDoorsAreOpen

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"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?
 
The solution to this problem is with the people and not enforcing some ideology politically to remedy the situation. We are where we are because people got sucked in by greed and materialism.. the lavish lives that used to be the domain of royalty is now accessible to anyone with a bit of money.

Being compassionate does not mean being soft. It helps to remember the animal nature of the human being and that even small children will manipulate, steal, and lie, in order to get things.. until they realize they can have what they want and so can others if we pool our resources/energy together. As with small children you offer a hand but you don't indulge them too much or they'll end up becoming spoiled brats. Firm but fair. A close friend of mine went to India and he was expecting spiritually inclined people and all that jazz, and he was quite disappointed by the manipulation to get your money.. but after the first experience he hardened straight up and was wise to future efforts. You can't be a walk over because people will pick up on this and run you dry. As with everything you got to find the middle ground.

The issue really is in your emotions/your desire to help, not in the situation itself (though the situation is a global issue we need to solve). Allow help when needed but don't go round just throwing your money at people. Not everyone will use your donation wisely.

If someone tries to cheat you, acknowledge the situation and the fact that this bastard tried it, turn your back, and just move on! There is no reason to get yourself twisted over it. They won't.. they'll probably just curse you too for being smart to their games and then try it with someone else.

Remaining open, compassionate, 'Jesus like', will only result in you becoming frustrated eventually. Be ready to be open, but don't walk around open all the time. Just be human.
 
One thing to keep in mind is that what may appear to be gouging may in fact be an increase in the cost of doing business that you the consumer cannot see. I am basing this on the insight that I would not have gotten but for the number of extended family members in various professions and trades. Just 3 examples: my sister is a veterinarian that has to have equivalent training and equipment to a human doctor and yet the cost of her doing a spay is literally a fraction of a hysterectomy in a human-- and yet people balk at what they see as high prices. My husband is a geotechnical engineer and his hourly fees are extremely high but he gets a fraction of that as profit while very few clients realize that he pays close to 50k per year in errors and omissions insurance (malpractice). He works in the same county as an engineer that always underbids everyone else. When her plans get to the county governing offices they are always rejected and then she tells the client that they will have to pay motre to do what the other engineers had already built into their bids. In this way she gets to look like she is reasonable and it is the government regulations (building to industry specs) that are at fault. A relative that owns a mechanic shop had to radically overhaul his business to comply with updated environmental laws--a good thing for all of us but expensive for him. Same with someone else in a powder-coating shop.

I'm not saying this to dispute the fact that there are people that will unfairly pad the bills but to round out the conversation by acknowledging that it is sometimes a hidden cost and not a fleecing. When in fact you are getting ripped off I think all you can do is to take your business elsewhere. I try to go on my intuition as much as I can but I also like to give business owners and professionals the benefit of inquiring about the prices I am paying. I think that trust is so battered and defeated in our culture that anything we can do to keep it alive in ourselves amounts to a revolutionary act. Trust and denial are not the same thing.
 
Sometimes saying no and withholding is compassionate, and if you are already stretched thin then how is it compassionate to yourself to give away your last morsel?

Even spiritually elevated people have to engage in self-defense, otherwise they would be completely torn apart by the masses. IMO this is why the imagery of prophets puts them on pedestals. It's not to imply they are better than us but because they need some degree of protection to maintain purity.
 
IMHO this sort of fuck-you-gotta-get-mine mindstate is a symptom of individualism. In the past, collectivism was the norm for all cultures. Only since industrialization and free-market capitalism has the concept of individualism been allowed to thrive, because now everyone is a specialist with a career and we've become accustomed to outsourcing the labour for everything we require outside of our narrow field of expertise.

Globalization has just accelerated the proliferation of individualism, forcing people to promote themselves in order to stand out in a global market where we no longer compete just with people in our own locality, but with everyone in the world who may have the same skill and same ability to do the same work we do, only better and for cheaper. I feel the evidence for this is in how important social networks have become. The facade is that we're using it to connect with our friends, but the reality is that we use our profiles to exercise control over how we are perceived by people who aren't our friends, but may be interested in using our labour and can be influenced by how we present ourselves.

I think what's going on in Europe right now is also a sign that people are beginning, subconsciously or consciously, to react strongly against the symptoms of individualism. Presently, there's a strong anti-EU fervor sweeping the continent, and nationalism is coming back into vogue. People are voting for a cultural renaissance to bring back some sense of collectivism so we can once again trust in our neighbours and they in us, and have our kids grow up respecting those bonds because that's what keeps communities together across generations.
 
I agree. I've lost all hope in this toilet the USA. I'm also surprised you were able to put up with the d1ckheads in med school. I was pre-med, and almost went, but I chose grad school instead. As a premed student, I'd never seen so many narcissistic, self-promoting, grabby, greedy, self-entitled yuppie-pricks-in-the-making in one place. A few of my premed classmates were great and weren't anything like that -- they tended to be altruistic and empathic (like you seem to be), but the vast majority were disgusting. By now, they would be physicians somewhere milking the system for as much as they can: the Institute of medicine http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medical-procedures-prove-unnecessary/ estimates that 30% ($800 Billion per year) of all medical procedures are unnecessary ---fraud, unneeded surgeries, medications, unwanted and unneeded testing, MRIs every time somebody stubs their big toe, etc. They enrich themselves while ripping off the patients ("consumers" to them) and insurance companies who in turn pass the cost to teh rest of us.

I have no idea how to deal with what's happening in this country and how to stay true to one's sense of ethics. As for boycotting a corrupt health care system, I work out and eat a balanced diet. When I'm old, rather than participate in (be a "consumer" of) corrupt geriatric health care, I'll have somebody carry me to a mountain top one winter.

This isn't a good era to be trying to earn an honest living (or even to be born if things keep going the way they ahve been). For the most part, I've dropped out of society. I live mostly off the grid, grow and harvest as much of my own food as I can, and participate as little as possible in consumerism (except for craigslist and scavenging). I'm able to earn money in a way that's ethical, and I try to do volunteer work for my area as much as I can.
 
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