A Good Life

I don't mean to be an ingrate.  I have a lovely wife and a wonderful daughter.  I live in a good enough house in a nice enough town.  I have a job that pays nearly well enough and that I could possibly eventually retire from if I live long enough and they don't decide they don't need me. I have a hobby that keeps me somewhat active and that could occasionally even be considered rewarding in itself. I have a nice dog and two delightful cats.  I have health.  I have a good enough life. 

But do I have a good life?  Does anyone?  Is a good life possible in our present circumstances.

Our society is such that in order for most to have a good life-- let's define it as a rich, rewarding life free of worry and care-- we have to do harm.  If more than enough money is the minimum requirement for a good life (and it's not clear that it alone is), then we either have to have more money than we know what to do with or we have to need less than most people need.  If we have more than enough money, wealth and goods, we have necessarily in this economy starved someone else to get it.  Capitalism depends on most people not having enough to live on.  In times of crisis this becomes explicit as our economic ministers openly devise policies to inflict pain at the overpopulated bottom of the pyramid so that ease continues flowing to the narrow top.  This is the gushing up reality that gives the lie to The Trickle Down Theory.  They do this by making living more expensive for the property-poor or by making ways to earn a living more scarce or more meager. 

Even in good economic times for most, when the truly miserable shut-outs of society are fewer, the cheap material effects of a good enough life in the wealthiest lands of the planet are made from the blood and ruin of the most immiserated and exploited parts of the world that we are privileged not to see. Blindness to the violence that makes even our modest comfort possible is a luxury and the prerogative of the Free. But the harm we do without lifting a finger has ways of intruding on our consciousness from time to time-- in the increase in extraordinary life threatening weather events, in the proliferation of random shootings and terror, in the massing of migrants seeking refuge at our borders, in the wars and conflagrations in distant places that we hear about on the news or that our leaders too frequently engage us in.  In this world, it's a luxury to preoccupy ourselves with cancel culture and wokeness.  But we have to preoccupy ourselves with silliness to distract us from the lie we all live: that if we are not living the good life it is by choice and not by the violence enforced  inequalities built into our system.

We seem to have strayed far afield from our original question, but I would argue that the system that depends on the misery of the many makes a good life for any but a very few out of the question.  Who are the few?  Is it those at the top who inflict misery on the rest?  Is it those in the middle who live a good enough life thanks to the meager graces of the few at the top and the invisible misery of the many at the bottom?  It is neither of these.  It is rather the unicorns who need less than most people need and have the means to get it.  For some people-- perhaps for you, dear reader if you are deeply satisfied with your life and not merely deluded or consciously unconscious about the casual harm that is required of others for you to be so-- it is a disposition.  To give an extreme example, it might be the bohemian who doesn't need to possess or consume something to be enriched by it, who somehow always has enough money to get by without selling her soul to a career or a job, who feels passionately and engages in causes and activities and creativities that give to the world.  Or it could simply be the person who has the most modest of needs that are easily met and a place in his community. 

A good life it seems to me is one that does not begrudge or preclude a good life for others.  And this is the main point I would like to make today.  In our current system of economics and politics, we do not center our concerns around the ability of people to have a good life.  In fact, too often, the inequalities of our way of life require us to lie to ourselves about the culpability that people have for their own quality of life.  We pretend that those worse off than us have chosen their misery even though if we examine our own life it should be abundantly clear that our comfort was chosen for us and that maintaining it has forced a meanness on the way we conduct ourselves and a smallness in the pursuit of our goals that is preoccupied with adherence to the shallow values of an artificially unequal society imposed from above on all of us.   

A society that is not about securing a good life for all of its citizens--not just for the "right kind" of citizen-- isn't worth a damn.  By this criterion, it should be obvious to all but the willfully self-deluded that the one we live in, as expensive and gaudy and daunting as it is is a worthless shameful sham.  We could go a long way toward redeeming ourselves by doing whatever it takes-- even increasing the misery at the top; they can afford it-- to ensure the basics for all citizens: good meaningful work in a democratic workplace when we need it at not just a living wage but a "good living" wage; health care on demand; as much quality education as we need and want; a home that doesn't bankrupt us; abundant means of public transportation; art, science and technology for all of us; bridges that don't collapse when they bump up against the forces of capitalism.   Paid in advance by each of us for all of us so it's there when we need it.  To enable this will undoubtedly take some major adjustments to our political system.  We could start with some tweaks to the current system: setting limits on the terms of all public officials; removing obstacles to democracy such as the electoral college in order to make our choices at the voting booth a reflection of the popular vote;  installing a more parliamentary form of government with more voter-responsive parties that would force the make-up of our legislative bodies to be a reflection of the vote rather than a winner-take-all farce in which the losing party gets no representation.  Or we could cut to the chase and replace our current system with one of sortition in which our representatives are selected randomly by lot from among all of us for short, non-consecutive terms.  Whatever we do, we must do something if we are to begin the road to redemption.

When the needs of the many are no longer knobs for the few to play with in order to ensure the fulfillments of their own many wants, but rather the shared concern of all, the question of what is a good life reverts to the one living it.