If you were creating a universe, would you create it without suffering?
If you did, people would need neither intelligence nor compassion. And we wouldIf you were creating a universe, would you create it without suffering?
If you did, people would need neither intelligence nor compassion. And we wouldn't develop it. People for whom everything always goes their way tend to become insensitive and entitled. The most recent Supreme Court appointee is a case in point. Commonly, people who have suffered are kind and generous.
(With nothing to strive for or avoid, life likely could never have developed.)
Also, if everything were perfect all the time, we wouldn't know it.
As Mark Twain noticed, happiness isn't a thing in itself, merely a contrast with something unpleasant.
We have the concept of health because there's disease. Ditto justice/injustice, and so on.
Twain shows that it's because we suffer that we know joy:(view spoiler)[
Twain noticed his Negro servant seemed always happy. He said, "Aunt Rachel, how is it you never had any trouble?" She looked at him incredulously. Then came her story. She was proud of having been born in Maryland. A favorite saying of hers was, "I wa'n't bawn in de mash to be fool' by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's Chickens, I is!"
Her husband and all her seven children were sold away from her. She never saw any of them again. Except:
During the war, 13 years later, a young Black soldier happens by and hears her say her pet phrase.
“Mammy?”
It was her youngest child.
“Oh no, Mister C. I ain't had no trouble. And no joy!”
This is A True Story (1874) from The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain: funny, sweet, and true. Several stories are rewrites of or riffs on Bible or religious stories or themes. –“Extract from the Diaries of Adam and Eve,” “Was It Heaven? Or Hell?,” “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” “The Mysterious Stranger,” “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.” (hide spoiler)]
If you suffer enough that the title question doesn't sound inane to you, the Bible does speak to it:
The Bible answers the question. Just not the answer you may want.
The author is from an Evangelical tradition that thinks, “God’s our pal. We have all the answers.” He’s starting to see the cracks, but still wants it to be true....more
James M. Buchanan in The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan advocates totalitarianism in defense of the freedom of the rich to do what they will, at the expense of everyone else. "Sponsored throughout his working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he developed a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution would look like, and a strategy for implementing it."
"In one respect, Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between what he called “economic freedom” and political liberty. Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control. The choice we face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy. You cannot have both.
"Buchanan’s programme is a prescription for totalitarian capitalism. And his disciples have only begun to implement it. But at least, thanks to MacLean’s discoveries, we can now apprehend the agenda. One of the first rules of politics is, know your enemy. We’re getting there."...more
Several income and estate graphs for France, UK, and US for 20th century of interest to the general reader.
A particularly illuminating one is on page 149 (167 of 584 of the pdf): Only from 1943 to 1986 did the highest-income .01% take no more than 100 times the average income in the United States. By 2000 the highest-income .01% were back up to 300 times the average income--a level last seen in 1928. It was just about a 40-year flirtation with progressive taxation, labor law, and antitrust law that allowed a middle class to thrive in the United States. A brief, shining moment. It's long over now. The bad old lords-and-serfs world is coming back.
That graph is repeated on page 234 (252 of 584 of the pdf) comparing to Canada, which has same pattern but less extreme.
The text is largely of interest only to specialists. The authors go into detail on methods of massaging the data.
Graphs are available on Piketty's World Wealth & Income database, http://wid.world
Thomas Ray
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