Can you be useful to society even when you can’t feed yourself?

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Last Updated on June 12, 2023 by Dhanvanthri

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Last Updated on June 12, 2023

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s cringe video

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Rishi Sunak’s one and only “empathetic” exchange with a homeless.

Have you ever seen/heard of a homeless person working in business or even, making plans for his weekend? Ask British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. He might let you know how to do it? – How to stay excited about your weekend plan even when you can’t figure out where your next meal is coming from.

To be fair, in Rishi Sunak’s defense, there could have been some exciting weekend plan, if only the homeless person stopped worrying and struggling for food, water, shelter, medicine, clothing, sanitation, job, safety, security, self-esteem, etc.

“Making plans for one’s weekend” has always meant for me – “How are you going to enjoy yourself this weekend?” “How are you going to have fun this weekend?” If not these questions, at least, it has always carried some positive connotation and expectation to have some fun and be happy.

The British Prime Minister can’t even have a meaningful conversation with the homeless. Forget about coming up with a solution for the homelessness issue.

No wonder UK is going through a Cost of Living crisis, where people are forced to choose between eating and heating. This has pushed more than 1 Million people into poverty this winter.

To answer the question – ‘Can you contribute and be useful to society even when you can’t feed yourself?’, we have to first understand self-interest, what it means for fulfilling our needs, and how is it different from and complementary to the collective interest.

Why we have Self-Interest

Everyone has needs, including all living beings. We can’t survive and thrive without fulfilling these needs. In order to meet these needs, living beings have developed their skills and capacities over thousands of generations. And, One of them is consciousness.

Consciousness allows us to be aware of the situation we are in and also of ourselves – self-awareness. This way we can consciously process the information we take in through our senses. Most animals don’t have a consciousness as developed as ours. They simply respond to their environment without much free will or consciousness. This reaction to the environment is achieved based on how their behavior is coded in their DNA.

This doesn’t mean they can’t learn any new behavior. As you must have taught a few tricks to your dog, animals do have the capacity to learn. But, it is very very limited compared to humans.

This advanced consciousness coupled with cognitive ability in humans allows us to represent, understand, analyze, and evaluate the reality we live in. That’s not it. They also enable us to create new realities through Creativity and Productivity.

This tremendous capacity has evolved to serve one strong purpose – The desire to fulfill one’s needs.

My theory is that the combination of consciousness and desire to fulfill individual needs is what causes Self-Interest in every human being and also in other living beings.

However, there is an upper limit to fulfilling our needs. After some point, every new unit to fulfill our needs feels less and less satisfying…. eventually leading to even feeling disgusting. This is also known as Diminutive Returns.

An example to understand Diminutive Returns

An example:

Before you have any Jamun or Dessert, you are very excited about it.

Once you have one, your excitement is barely satisfied. But, leaving you wanting more.

So, you have the second one. Your desire is quite satisfied, but at the same time, setting off a craving to have more.

Now you are very excited and can’t wait to have a third one. When you have it, you are very happy and feel like you are on top of the world.

Now you try to have more of this feeling by having one more – fourth one. When you take a bite, you notice you are no more happy than it was with the third one.

You take another bite to confirm. With this bite, the happiness even goes down. Now, you are confused.

While desperately forcing yourself to restore the happiness that you once had, you slowly try to savor whatever is left. But, this has replaced even the little happiness you had with disgust towards Jamun. Now, you feel like throwing up. This is Diminutive Returns.

3rd Jamun might not be the upper limit for you. It could be 30. But, there exists a limit beyond which even something exciting and enjoyable turns repulsive and disgusting.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Self-Interest

Maslow classifies needs into 3 categories – Basic needs(Physiological needs and Safety needs), Psychological needs(Belonging & love needs, Esteem needs), and Self-Actualization(self-fulfillment). Though Maslow made these categories of needs for an individual with self-interest, it requires collective interest as well to fulfill some of them. For example, Belonging and love needs.

Maslow’s pyramid says that higher-level needs are fulfilled only when lower ones are met. That means it is hard to focus on Esteem needs when we are struggling to feed ourselves – Physiological needs. This is because Esteem needs are higher than Physiological needs in the pyramid.

The bottommost level in the pyramid, which is Physiological needs – food, water, warmth, rest, is completely driven by self-interest. What I mean by this is it doesn’t require you to fulfill others’ physiological needs to meet your own. In other words, one can fulfill these physiological needs even when another person in the family is dying of hunger.

But, this is not possible with other higher-level needs like – love and belonging, safety and security. One cannot expect love from a person when the same person is not showing love. One cannot expect others to accept them as a member of a group when they themselves don’t do it. This goes even for Safety needs. This means one has to care about others, not just themselves. So, both, Collective and Self-interest go hand in hand.

If someone wants to fulfill their Esteem and Self-actualization needs, they can’t do it without getting any help from others. This help could be education or from coworkers in a team. This too requires paying attention to others’ interests. It might not always be a collective interest but it definitely goes beyond serving only one’s self-interest.

This clearly tells us that in order to fulfill our higher-level needs, acting only on self-interest is not enough. If we do so, we are always stuck at the lower-level needs.

We should always rise up to fulfilling our higher-level needs after fulfilling lower-level ones. But, if everyone cares about their own self-interest, it gets harder to fulfill higher-level needs even if you care about others or collective interest. This is because acting according to one’s self-interest only meets one’s lower-level needs.

So, we as one single species should come together and find a way to fulfill our physiological needs without paying much cost for it – price, work, or difficulty. This will help us raise above our self-interest. This will automatically not only make our society pay more attention to the collective problems but also make it more kind, compassionate, and empathetic.

People usually think it costs a lot to end World Hunger. But, it doesn’t.

Here’s a quote from an expert.

Back in July of 2021, U.N. World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley told us it would take an estimated $40 billion each year to end world hunger by 2030. “That seems like a lot of money,” Beasley said. “But in the United States alone, in the last one year, the U.S. billionaires’ net worth increase was over $1 trillion.”.

https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/

We would truly solve the problem of fulfilling our lower-level needs along with the problem of self-interest, once and for all when we treat World Hunger and World Homelessness like another Pandemic.

So, in the next section, we will see the role of government in supporting people to meet their lower-level needs.

Why people need support just like companies do

Can a company produce more, run efficiently, and finally, be successful, without a good infrastructure? Not just infrastructure but also peace, safety, and security in society?

Businesses can only distribute their goods efficiently if the connectivity is good – fast and affordable. They cannot be more productive without meeting energy needs. These are the basic requirements to be fulfilled for any company’s operation to run smoothly. So, these common basic requirements make up a platform in which businesses can not only establish themselves but also thrive.

Just like businesses need this platform or infrastructure to develop, people need a good education, healthcare, welfare systems, and guaranteed living wages to develop. With business development, the economy might grow and some individuals can become rich but not necessarily society as a whole.

We also know that it is people who make businesses successful. If people get the support from the government as businesses do. we will see more and more people coming together and taking risks not only in forming new businesses but also bringing in social changes as well – social entrepreneurship.

So, It is only fair to ask Government to provide a similar platform for people. Otherwise, humans are simply stuck in low gear.

Humans stuck in low gear while businesses are thriving

Businesses, especially large corporations, have become highly influential in the last few decades. They lobby. They fund political campaigns. They control the mainstream media. So, these organizations have become more powerful than the government itself.

Corporations’ productivity is driven by technology and innovation. Especially, in this era of digitization, where every aspect of production including humans is monitored to gain the maximum efficiency as possible. Therefore, productivity and efficiency are not gained by humans but by technology.

Some might say that it is humans who design, develop and test technologies before deploying them for production. Of course, this is true. But, efficiency gain is not achieved by one person or even one organization without using tools and technologies that are themselves the results of efficiency gains over generations.

In other words, no one is making that efficiency gain by building everything from the scratch and reinventing the wheel. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. So, Instead of humans slaving for a minimum of 9 hours every day for each small incremental potential efficiency gain, we have to make these efficiency gains effectively work for all of us. In short, instead of humans working for efficiency gain, we should have efficiency gains work for us. Then, we will get to focus on something like HDI- Human Development Index along with GDP by finally putting humans at the center of society rather than machines.

But, now, we have become too busy measuring GDP because the government can fill up its treasury through tax revenue. We have lost sight of human development as a goal. So, there is this growth that might result in real growth for businesses and business owners, but not really to the working class and poor.

Therefore, the vast majority of the population all over the world will always be stuck in low gear while businesses are thriving. This is already taking a toll on the fabric of our society and slowly, losing whatever is left of social cohesion in our society.

Social cohesion

When people’s basic needs are not met, people can’t afford to pay attention to anything else other than basic needs. This makes people think only about themselves. Even if they want to help anyone else, they have to do so by sacrificing some of their basic needs from being fulfilled. When everyone is struggling to meet basic needs, helping out a fellow being comes at a huge cost. This is a scenario where the stakes are too high.

When stakes are high, people employ all kinds of tools at their disposal including unethical ones. This is due to our bias of loss aversion acting out. This leads to a loss of trust among members of society.

When people don’t trust one another, they assume the worst of each other. When they assume the worst of each other, they lose even more faith in others. This is a vicious cycle for any society to be in. This vicious cycle is what destroys any community or society.

Unfortunately, we as a single species all over the world is badly stuck in this vicious cycle. Starting from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 80s, when she implemented neo-liberal economic policies in the UK and advocated for it in the rest of the world by saying – “There is no such thing as a society only individuals”. This begs the question – if there is no society and only individuals, are those individuals suffering from NDP – Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

This got even worse after the Great Recession in 2008, when countries responded with Austerity measures – spending cuts to public services. When Public Services like Social Security – Food, Housing and Education and Healthcare can’t perform well or smoothly, we can’t expect a better performance from citizens either.

In conclusion, Government has to find a way to fund public services that meets everyone’s physiological lower-level needs. Either by taxing the superrich or fixing the loopholes for tax evasion or whatever it is. The government should do it as it is not only good for the poor and working class but also for businesses, and Social Cohesion, which means a lower crime rate.