The Lies of Rawls

[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho]

I’ve been told “Luck Is Other People’s Work” ignores that things could have been some other way, and it’s lucky that they’re not. Sure, maybe “Luck” is not scattered randomly by a capricious god of Chaos, since for nearly every thing that I have that I didn’t earn, someone else did actually earn it, and then gave it to me. So yeah, saying it was granted by “luck” is erasing them from existence and placing myself as the start of history.

But what about the truly random quirks of birth?

Unearned Comparative Advantage

I’m 6’2” and male. My mother is like 5’2” and maybe 16 pounds. Vacuuming is an almost a trivial task for me and isn’t so much for my mother, so it was my chore since I was like 10. This is good, when I can do the task with less effort it makes sense for me to do it.

I also mowed the lawn from that age, which was not a trivial effort in the benighted “push the thing yourself” era. When I mowed my parents’ lawn as an adult for the first time a few years ago I was shocked. When I was a child it was hard labor. As an adult it was merely inconvenient. I thought “it seems almost immoral for me to ever make a son of mine mow the lawn when the difference in effort is so great.”

This helped lead to the scene in What Lies Dreaming where, in a lull between skirmishes in Rome, Andreas observes children hauling stones to the tops of nearby tenements to stockpile for dropping on soldier’s heads later. He’s exhausted, he knows he needs to recover his strength to fight when the soldiers return. And yet he still feels the crushing guilt of watching children struggle to carry these rocks up five flights when he could do it so easily by comparison. It should be him carrying those stones, because he has the physical gifts to make it easy. But he can’t. He’s only one person.

I hate this scene, because it’s how I feel about so much in life. The comparative advantages some people have are ridiculously OP. It’s monstrously unfair. This alone is proof that there is no Just god in heaven. How can I force children to labor to do something I can achieve so simply? How can I watch a turtle struggling on its back when I could flip it over with barely a thought? And yet the turtles are infinite, and I can only do so much. What do we do with this undeniable difference in capabilities that no one earned and can’t be equally spread?

With Great Unearned Comparative Advantage

Superheroes know that with Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. Height, health, intellect, beauty, drive, familial wealth — these are all forms of power.

Nobles (at least, the good kind of nobles) agreed. Their power came with a duty to help uplift and defend those with less power.

Even Jesus came to a similar conclusion. He said someone given a lot of talents had a duty to create a lot of value with them. Someone with less talents had a lesser duty to create some value with them.

Whether it’s called a (heroic) Responsibility or a (noble) Obligation or a (holy) Duty, these are all forms of a Karmic Debt. I was given more, I can do more, and so I should do more. But one of the most important things about debt is that it is owed to someone. Who owns this Karmic Debt?

Traditionally, those who made it possible for the individual to exist at all.

Superheroes use it to protect the city they live in.

Nobles use it protect and guide the commoners of the lands they govern.

Jesus said to repay God. In the absence of an actually-existing god, one generally gives labor/resources to the church instead, which (ideally) serves the community.

This is proper, and a good thing. Without our communities we’re just apes that don’t have enough fur to survive winters, don’t have enough intestines to properly eat food, and have brains that kill our mothers in childbirth in exchange for crippling existential angst.

Everything we have is due to the other humans around us and preceding us. Without them, even the most gifted of us would have virtually nothing. Slightly more deer meat and berries at best. So our first duty is to our family, who we most depend on for survival. Then on other kin and our closest friends, who we depend on more broadly. After that our community, our meta-community, and our greater extended social structures and institutions.

When I am reminded that I have advantages that I didn’t earn, I am thankful for all that I’ve been given. I could not exist without all these people, both living and in the past, who have given me the opportunities to use my two, or three, or five talents to their fullest. I am grateful to be able to pay-it-forward to the next generation, or to others around me who need help, or pay-it-back to my parents and mentors and leaders.

If this was what people meant by “you’re really lucky” I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I would agree! But too often what they mean is much darker.

The Lies of Rawls

Rawls coined the Veil of Ignorance as a thought experiment to think about social governance. It’s a workable tool for that¹, but it has been corrupted. Rather than being used to think about what’s in the best average-good for the large majority of humanity, it is repurposed to hypothetically erase all history and alienate the subject from their humanity.

The Veil actually literally asks you to consider being pulled out of your body as a magical soul, reinventing society from the ground up, then being shuffled up with all the other souls and inserted into a random body.

A Veiler using the corrupted version will tell me I should imagine that I could be anyone else in existence, because actually I could be anyone. My genes/family wealth/country/etc weren’t under my control. They could, in theory, have been set to any value upon character creation.

Well that wouldn’t be me, then. It would be that other person. To demonstrate how dumb this is, remember that genes are far more variable than the Veiler initially lets on. Genes can make humans of any color and size, and they can also make chicken and shrimp. At first the Veiler is asking you to consider yourself interchangeable with any other human, because the only reason I’m me and not someone else is pure dumb luck! But soon after the Veiler points out that “Hey, you know, you could be a chicken too. Or a shrimp. Hell, the only reason you aren’t an insect is pure dumb luck! The Veil of Ignorance motherfcker! For all you know, you could’ve been born an E. Coli!”

We are the product of a long chain of causality that starts most solidly with our parents, but extends out to everyone who set up the society we live in and everyone that impacted our lives. To take the Veil seriously necessitates the nullification of the entire mass of human action that created everything that created us. No longer is there a history of striving and creating and taking risks and loving deeply. There are only disembodied parameters that somehow existed upon your creation. How did they get there? DOESN’T MATTER! They’re blind luck to you! Random chance! You had nothing to do with them!

What makes us human is our connections to other humans. Alone we are alienated, amputated minds. Together we are vibrant, beautiful organisms. The invoking of a Veil to psychologically isolate a human from everything meaningful about life is an assault on their humanity. Ripped out of my community, out of my family, out of my body, and out of the circumstances of my life, and then thrust into some other combination of those things, doesn’t give me a different experience. It kills me utterly.

Luck Vampires

Why would anyone launch an attack on someone’s psyche like that? Why tell them they are nothing but blind luck? Because those with “good luck” — with an unearned comparative advantage — have already internalized the moral belief that they owe a Karmic Debt.

This is, as stated above, good! It’s prosocial, and it benefits everyone, including the lucky! As long as that debt in (A) limited, and (B) primarily discharged into the person’s community. When I object to someone referring to an advantage as blind luck, it’s because they want to tear my feelings of obligation away from the people who are responsible for my good fortune and redirect them onto a quasi-mystical inscrutable force of nature(?).

Once my karmic debt is owed to Luck it is owed to an abstract concept. Anyone or anything can stand in for that concept. If someone positions themselves well, they can siphon away a lot of the labor, energy, and resources I might have given to the people who helped actually create the conditions for my thriving. In return I get crippling alienation, plus guilt that I am so depressed while being so “lucky.”

It’s certainly not the only way the word is used. Sometimes it really is a celebration of fortunate advantages and a small reminder that you owe a lot to others. “You’re great, this is awesome, we’re happy that you’re our Spiderman!” But watch out for the vampires. Remember who most gleefully taught you to sever yourself from the beating heart of the world. You’ll bleed for years for them, and when your luck runs out they won’t even remember you existed. Keep the garlic handy!

1. OK that’s a lie, his actual position is bonkers dumb. But a sane-washed version is useful, and that’s the version most people are familiar with, so we’ll assume that one.