Sacrifice
Sacrifice is any effort we make in order to improve the circumstances of our lives, both as individuals and as a group of people relying on our individual efforts. The former type of sacrifice is a personal investment and the latter a social one.
When I say that there is no common defense of our belief left in western societies, then I mean in particular that there is no public recognition of the vital role sacrifice plays for our well-being.
We argue that greed and envy will provide us with the services we need, as long as we stop them from pursuing criminal ventures.
But let us take health care for instance. The truth is that if we don't care for the health of others, there is no efficient health care system. What are the options?
For a health care system to work properly, you need sacrifice somewhere, be it at the top, as in the first alternative, or at the bottom, as in the second.
There are other fields with similar dynamics, the dissemination of knowledge being one of them, in which the monastery systems combines the sacrifices of both of the described approaches, taking in monks independent of their means and pursuing research independent of worldly reward.
It is wrong to ride greed and envy as we do and denounce sacrifice, wrong to aspire to be a beast tamer and not a fellow man. But vice will rear its ugly head until its hubris will have caused its fall.
When I say that there is no common defense of our belief left in western societies, then I mean in particular that there is no public recognition of the vital role sacrifice plays for our well-being.
We argue that greed and envy will provide us with the services we need, as long as we stop them from pursuing criminal ventures.
But let us take health care for instance. The truth is that if we don't care for the health of others, there is no efficient health care system. What are the options?
- Single payer leads to a dysfunctional market: one consumer, a handful of producers, one side saying You can only buy from us, the other You can only sell to me, no price discovery, ensured corruption. So if a state takes health care into its own hands, it either has to rely on foreign research or it has to assign medical research to state institutions, i.e. research centers and universities, in order to avoid that, but the former alternative really is only for small states. Big states then will depend on the sacrifices their state employed researchers are ready to make on the behalf of those in need of new treatments.
- A free medical market will create no incentives to look after the health of people who are not well off. So these people depend on the sacrifices in the form of charity that common practitioners are ready to make.
For a health care system to work properly, you need sacrifice somewhere, be it at the top, as in the first alternative, or at the bottom, as in the second.
There are other fields with similar dynamics, the dissemination of knowledge being one of them, in which the monastery systems combines the sacrifices of both of the described approaches, taking in monks independent of their means and pursuing research independent of worldly reward.
It is wrong to ride greed and envy as we do and denounce sacrifice, wrong to aspire to be a beast tamer and not a fellow man. But vice will rear its ugly head until its hubris will have caused its fall.
Labels: 22, geschichte, gesellschaftsentwurf, gesellschaftskritik, gesetze, institutionen, sehhilfen, zeitgeschichte, ἰδέα, φιλοσοφία
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