Charity for Society’s Canaries

After Robin Williams’s suicide, SlateStarCodex wrote a thoughtful meditation, and I’d like to highlight one of the points he wound up making.  Scott works in mental health, and he wound up discussing the idea of “being a burden” and pointing out that this isn’t an intrinsic fact about a person, but the result of who they are and how their society relates to them.

Society got where it is by systematically destroying everything that could have supported him [a patient] and replacing it with things that required skills he didn’t have. Of course it owes him when he suddenly can’t support himself. Think of it as the ultimate use of eminent domain; a power beyond your control has seized everything in the world, it had some good economic reasons for doing so, but it at least owes you compensation!

This is also the basis of my support for a basic income guarantee. Imagine an employment waterline, gradually rising through higher and higher levels of competence. In the distant past, maybe you could be pretty dumb, have no emotional continence at all, and still live a pretty happy life. As the waterline rises, the skills necessary to support yourself comfortably become higher and higher. Right now most people in the US who can’t get college degrees – which are really hard to get! – are just barely hanging on, and that is absolutely a new development. Soon enough even some of the college-educated won’t be very useful to the system. And so on, until everyone is a burden. …

By the time I am a burden – it’s possible that I am already, just because I can convince the system to give me money doesn’t mean the system is right to do so, but I expect I certainly will be one before I die – I would like there to be in place a crystal-clear understanding that we were here first and society doesn’t get to make us obsolete without owing us something in return.

After that, we will have to predicate our self-worth on something other than being able to “contribute” in the classical sense of the term. Don’t get me wrong, I think contributing something is a valuable goal, and one it’s important to enforce to prevent free-loaders. But it’s a valuable goal at the margins, some people are already heading for the tails, and pretty soon we’ll all be stuck there.

It’s easy to assume, when you don’t fit nicely or happily into society that it means that there’s something wrong with you, but civil society, and the economy, and all the other structures of human relations exist to serve human flourishing — we don’t exist to simply keep the suprastructures running smoothly.

Looking at the people treated as ‘burdens’ and asking what we could do differently for them is good for the individual people currently left out, but I expect it’s also good for the rest of us.  Think of them as canaries in the coal mine — showing us what our society currently doesn’t emphasize/value/offer by default.  If for people in crisis, these needed goods are absent, are you sure they’re not attenuated in your own life?

Sometimes, the changes needed to allow people to join the “ordinary” world are small (more flexibility in work structure, more patience on the part of coworkers for non-neurotypical reactions to touch or interruptions).  But there’s almost an anti-curbcutting attitude that is suspicious of these accomodations — if we allow them for some people, what if more people try to use them?   Well, possibly it suggests the accomodations are just plain useful.  (cf the way the environmental and emotional prerequisites for successful unschooling are good for adults as well as kids).

It may be logistically difficult to make everyone’s life more stable/pleasant/engaging in the way that “burdensome” people require to keep their heads above water, but that represents an imperfection of our society, not an imperfection of people for longing for leisure/patience/charity/etc.

P.S. For a very concrete example of a feature of society that made it harder to be a non-burden, see Elizabeth Warren’s The Two Income Trap (which Scott has also reviewed thoughtfully).