One of the many things I learned while doing podcasts with Seth Rosenblatt was that individualism, in order to realize its fullest potential, must be exercised (at least for humans!) within a high functioning community. That’s because isolated humans must spend so much time taking care of basic life needs, they can’t take full advantage of what their minds and bodies are capable of achieving. Or, as I like to put it, isolated humans are just big prey…but communities of humans are the most powerful (and dangerous) life form the Earth has yet produced1.
Fortunately, humans are quite capable of forming communities because we are social primates. The primate part makes us inquisitive, intelligent, gives us great vision, and makes us master manipulators of the environment2. The social part lets us work together so we can each do things that none of us could do by ourselves.
The two sets of traits are not in balance. The primate traits — self-interest traits — are dominant. Which complicates things immensely: we constantly fight among ourselves as to how to form, and govern, communities. High-functioning communities find a way to curb self-interest, so it doesn’t do too much harm to other community members and the community as a whole. You can end up with a low functioning community by skewing too far either way, towards excessive individualism or excessive communalism. Communism, for example, shows the significant downsides of too much communalism.
Sadly, America in the 2020s is showing the downside of too much individualism. There’s not a single highly economically successful individual among us who could’ve gotten to where they are today without being part of a reasonably high functioning community. It’s a shame, a real shame, that so many of them use the power of their success to pull the drawbridge up behind them.
And it’s very, very odd that so many less economically successful people applaud and support those efforts.
I was reminded of this today when I was having coffee at Peets. I happened to overhear a conversation that another patron — let’s call him Joe — started with a couple of other people, at least one of whom was apparently an employee of the county.
Joe, it turns out, was seeking their help on gathering signatures to overturn Prop 19. That’s the proposition, narrowly approved recently by the citizens of California, which modified the rules under which homeowners can retain their property’s historical assessed value when buying a new home. The changes made it easier to retain the historical value in some cases and blocked retention in others, most notably in ordinary transfers — meaning ones not involving environmental disasters — from parents to children.
The two guys Joe was pitching wanted nothing to do with his lobbying effort, and made it clear they thought overturning Prop 19 would be a Bad Idea. I think so, too, so I caught the eye of one of the two guys and gave him a thumbs up. Which led him to stop by and chat. Among other things, I told him how I thought it was nuts my (admittedly much newer) home was assessed at 20 times the value of a comparably sized older home next door. Yes, mine is worth more because it’s newer. But not that much more!
This caused Joe to come over and join the discussion. He initially assumed I was in favor of repeal but I quickly corrected him on that score. Which totally confused him. He literally could not understand why anyone would think repeal would be a bad idea since “people have a right to keep living where they are”.
Them’s fighting words. More importantly, they’re words that demonstrate a profound lack of understanding of market capitalism. When I pointed out one can only live in a home so long as you can afford to, he said “That’s not true.” I told him that if he tried to live in a home bought with a mortgage that he refused to repay, the bank would evict him…and have the legal system behind them as they did so3.
That caused Joe to bring up a truly bizarre argument which I’m not sure I understood. He asserted no one could do that because he was part of the army so the army wouldn’t come for him. I think he was asserting some kind of sovereign citizen nonsense. In any event, when I agreed the army wouldn’t come after him, but the police would he asserted again he was part of the army and would defend himself.
He didn’t like it when I said that would make him no different than a bank robber, and that he would be dealt with accordingly, likely being convicted and incarcerated.
Where in the world do these nut jobs come from? How can they get to be 40+ years old and not have learned at least a few basic things about the society they live in4? Don’t they understand that being able to pursue their self-interest necessitates everyone else — including the people who own and operate banks — being able to do the same5? Do they not realize they themselves would more than likely be among the first to get harmed after their insane pursuit of self-interest undermines the community they live in? Or are they insane enough to think they can live life completely on their own?
Sometimes I wonder how much longer our grand experiment will last with people like Joe in it. Not to mention I get increasingly amazed it’s creaked along as long as it has.
One of my favorite sayings is “The other animals crap in the pants they don’t know how to make when we walk by.” ↩
thank you, opposable thumbs! ↩
I should’ve remarked I was surprised he was such a communist; that generally really gets to these guys. ↩
I got more pleasure than I should have when Joe, in an attempt to overawe me with his credentials, told me he’d been a finance guy for 20 years. To which I replied, me, too; I was CFO of a biotech company. Twice. He then asserted he had studied Prop 13 and was an expert on it…to which I replied I’d been an elected school board and city council official for nearly 20 years and so knew more than a little bit about it, too. ↩
I like to say a major difference between a child and an adult is that an adult has been forced to learn to at least pretend other people have rights, too. ↩
