Before the impromptu tribute to The
Doors in my last post, I had gone through the cathartic exercise of describing
aspects of my life that I didn't find particularly agreeable. I intend for this
post to be more positive and constructive, with a focus on solutions to those problems.
Along the way, there will be opportunities aplenty for discussing big-picture
concepts like wisdom and good lives.
I have a tendency to focus on
knowing and learning, and am not as comfortable with bargaining and earning. I
don't believe that a trade-off exists between these two activities – after all,
many people learn to earn. Instead, I suspect that my discomfort stems from a
difficulty to put a price tag on my skills. Neither do I want to undervalue
myself and be taken advantage of, nor do I wish to exploit others by demanding
more than what is fair. If there were a way for me to make a clear, objective
self-evaluation, I would feel more at ease while negotiating a salary, setting
a consultation fee, or engaging in similar business transactions that involve
fuzzy, intangible services.
Even when there are established
market rates for some of these services, the quality of work that different
service providers offer can vary tremendously. There might be exceptions, where
every service provider's output is worth the same. However, even a seemingly
trivial task (like screwing
caps onto tubes of toothpaste) can be performed with varying degrees of
precision and diligence. Perhaps truly discrete, pass-or-fail activities don't
exist at all, and if they do, there's a good chance that they're not worth
enough to pay a human to perform.
While these sorts of conundrums
probably don't faze the average businessperson or employee, I happen to be a
student of philosophy. Questions of scruples have thoroughly trounced what
little business sense I might have with astonishing regularity, or have at
least crippled them by setting what André Kukla calls "mental
traps". I don't have his book handy (it's sitting in a cardboard box
in Toronto), I think he calls this particular trap "recursion". In
essence, instead of continuing with the problem at hand ("How can I earn money from my expertise?"), I discover
another problem nested inside it ("What
constitutes a fair price?"), like a Russian matryoshka doll. I then find myself tackling the
nested (though not necessarily "smaller") problem, at the expense of
the first. What's worse is that the nested problem is usually far less
practical, often offering no immediate return on the considerable intellectual
investment that its solution requires. This problem becomes my own personal Zeno's paradox,
preventing me from ever returning to the original matter, either because it's
just too hard to reach an acceptably accurate answer, or because it begets
nested problems of its own; onions within onions.
I bring up these bizarre mental
gymnastics for reasons other than – okay... in addition to – comic self-deprecation. Firstly, my reluctance to
assign specific value to myself or my actions provides a key insight into what
motivates me to understand wisdom.
I'm not an economist, and I don't
have a firm stance on whether capitalism is a boon or a menace to civilization.
However, I do believe that despite the popular claim that there are some things
you can't put a price tag on, the invention of currency has drastically reduced
the number of things for which this is true. It appears that currency allows
people to trade in their subjective evaluation of things in the world for an
objective value, literally allowing them to compare apples to oranges. While
this value is neither absolute nor accurate, it is irresistibly convenient, and
this convenience has made monetary systems ubiquitous, if not entirely
universal.
What of the things in life that
don't readily lend themselves to monetization? Sometimes, a provisional,
approximate value is assigned to them, as and when the need arises. These
assigned values can have a major impact on a person's entire lifestyle ("Do I care for my child myself, or get
a higher-paying, more demanding job and hire a babysitter?"), or might
help resolve some urgent yet relatively unimportant matter ("How much extra am I willing to pay for
the custom paint job?").
Other times, however, things that
lack a tidy dollar amount seem to lose value, or at least perceived value. In the same way that easy to reach, highly visible
items tend to be discussed, purchased or eaten more frequently then
out-of-the-way, obscure ones, items that are more difficult to appraise are
often more susceptible to floccinaucinihilipilification.
There are, of course, several caveats and qualifications that apply – that different
people (and even the same people at different points in time) make different
value judgments is just one example.
Even so, not being able to assign a
monetary value to engaging conversation versus smarmy salesmanship, or genuine
camaraderie versus an opportunistic alliance might make at least some people
think that the former pleasantries are merely sentimental and illusory,
especially when compared to their latter, profit-yielding counterparts. Once
again, not all people think this way, but I have a strong suspicion that
attributing monetary value to an option will make it more salient than
alternatives for which no such value has been set. When asked directly, people
might very well claim to prefer an unpriced option, but I have little doubt
that the priced option will be more successful in capturing people's unprovoked
attention.
Let's turn back to wisdom. What, if
anything, can be said of a person's worth, qua
person? We regularly assign people normative labels like "good" and
"bad" (or "evil", depending on the context),
"successful" or "unsuccessful" and so on. However, as I
mentioned above, subjective value judgments are fraught with problems, while a
person's net worth is inescapably unambiguous. People have a much easier time
agreeing upon whether someone is wealthy or poor than whether that he or she is
"good at" being a person. Instead of wading into murky territory and
debating whether a penniless saint is worth more than a misanthropic
trillionaire, people are more likely to avoid the question entirely. Those of
you familiar with the history of psychology might recognize this move as
something akin to behaviorism; avoid the unquantifiable, and hope that it will
one day be explained away as a naive "folk" concept. While most
people avoid voicing such beliefs explicitly, some people might genuinely think
that a person that hasn't succeeded financially has nothing of value to offer
the world.
That's one of the big reasons that
I'm interested in wisdom. If there were some indisputable set of criteria that
could be used to determine a person's relative "worth", that would be
astounding.
Before I say any more, though, I
need to be absolutely clear that I do not
wish to oppose the concept of inalienable human rights. It is important to find
a way to avoid literally and unconditionally treating every person equally (for
example, treating heroes or philanthropists the same way that we treat
murderers or thieves), or advocating unequal treatment based on irrelevant
criteria (race, gender, age, net worth, etc.).
Part of the solution to this
particular issue might require a few shifts in thinking. To avoid
"worthy" and "worthless" from becoming some horrible
Orwellian method of "scientifically" segregating societies into haves
and have-nots, like some kind of cognitive Gattaca, a person's worth must
be inherently changeable, and not an inescapable, life-long constant.
Furthermore, people's attitude towards this normative evaluation must be free
of blame, both towards environmental factors as well as towards each other.
Instead, it should be understood that becoming better at being a person is
probably the one objective that a person has most complete control over. As
discussed by Stoicism and other schools of thought, people might not always be
able to change their surroundings or circumstances, they are always free to
modify their own attitudes towards these external conditions.
In the relatively brief time that
I've been alive, I have had the opportunity to interact with, I daresay, a
fairly diverse sample of humanity, including people of varying social status,
level of education, monetary worth, behavioral dispositions, ethnic
backgrounds, physical and mental capacities, and so on. While this by no means
makes me an expert on the human psyche, it has certainly led me to believe that
far too many people are incorrectly appraised (either by others or by
themselves) to be better or worse people than they actually are, and that these
discrepancies almost always stem from the selection (by a society or an
individual) of some irrelevant set of criteria for comparison.
While it is encouraging to note
that inappropriate measures of personal worth, such as a person's heritage,
gender, or wealth continue to lose credibility in many parts of the world, this
trend will make it increasingly important to discover, synthesize, or otherwise
agree upon more appropriate normative standards. It isn't immediately clear
whether some infallible form of such standards could exist at all, but at least
pursuing this line of inquiry appears to have merit.
That was the first reason for
bringing up my internal debate about personal worth. The second reason, a more
thorough discussion of which I'll have to leave for another day, relates to my
more immediate problems and their attempted solutions.
See? I told you I'd be able to fit in some big-picture stuff.
