The most radical thing we can do with abundance is share it.
We live on a planet with such extraordinary abundance that we can easily provide every person with healthcare, decent housing, and good food. Anything short of this is evil.
Instead, the poor subsidize the rich. The slaves subsidize the lifestyle of the masters. Employees ensure the safety of their employers by giving up their own. The serfs toil, and the gentry enjoy the fruits of that labor. Soldiers march, slog, fight, suffer and die, and the nobles are kept secure. This is the constant pattern of history, and the story of the world today. It is time—long overdue—to change the plot.
As long as we cling to the fiction that evolution favors the “apex predator”—the strongest bully—then we’ll accept inequality as natural, and resign ourselves to it, even approve of it.
In their vision, the social order is a fight—winners and losers. We celebrate those who claw to the top, leaving others wounded and discarded. The many apologists for this flawed vision are dead wrong.
Instead, if we embrace the value of mutual care—me for you, you for me—ensuring each other’s food, clothing, housing, healthcare, education and safety, just as we’d protect our own children, then the same bright light would shine on all of us. None would be left in the foul darkness.
Every form and degree of slavery—coercion of some for the benefit of others—can come to an end. It must.
We all fund the fire department. They come wherever and whenever there’s a fire—with equal urgency, rich or poor. We’re smart enough to have figured this out for our shared safety. So how can we not be smart enough to realize the principle applies fully and rightly to each other’s health? Or housing? Or food? Or education? Or safety?