Community and Obligation
When can we fulfill our moral obligations to a larger society?
Justin Farrell’s exploration of the ultra-wealthy in Wyoming brought up a pointed but humanistic question about financial success: Do the wealthy feel guilty in the face of their area’s great financial inequality? Some do, some don’t, but what’s important here is why someone might feel guilty.
Guilt is formed from unfulfilled moral obligations. A religious person might feel guilty for not attending church the past two weeks; a student might feel guilty for cheating on a test; a parent might feel guilt from realizing they had neglected their child for years.
When one’s moral character is compromised—and one recognizes that it has been compromised, guilt may follow.
Returning back to the question: Why should the ultra-wealthy feel guilty about their wealth or using it for themselves?
Our society has a vague but powerful narrative that financial wealth is the primary mode of attaining a healthy, safe life, and those that amass wealth for their own use are removing opportunities for a healthy, safe life from others.
In other words, extravagant financial wealth turns a “good life” into a zero-sum game. Efforts to redistribute wealth attempt to remove its zero-sum characteristics. Thus, it is assumed that the wealthy have a societal obligation to redistribute their wealth for the benefit of everyone else.
Our society is in a precarious situation in which our health and safety appear to be in the hands of a value exchange system that can be easily manipulated and gamed, creating a minority of “winners” and a majority of “losers.”
Yet, in this casino that we call civilized society, we appear to blame the other participants rather than the casino. We are likely familiar with the phrase, “don’t hate the player, hate the game”.
In practice, this is a very hard proposition because we have been told that the game (or global economic system) is the only thing protecting society’s supposed stability from anarchic chaos. Thus we can only blame ourselves and each other, because the game cannot be criticized.
All parties, wondering if they should feel guilty or someone else should, begin to resent the other group for failing unspoken but assumed obligations. Some people create laws and policies to mandate the redistribution of wealth; others fight it.
The story of a national community built on financial wealth, already fragile from being subject to the millions of personal interpretations of wealth, shatters as obligations are no longer personal but part of the machinery of governance.
Like I proposed in “The Health of a Village”, a community’s health does not thrive on mandates or policies forced on the group, but from the instinctual obligations some people have to others.
Typically, obligation is first found between family members. Tied by blood, residence, socialization, and sometimes necessity, family members do not wait for mandates to maintain each other’s health and safety. Many families don’t have to think at all to help the other. Thus, community can be strongest within the family unit.
In some cultures, there is little difference between one’s family and one’s neighbors, as all are part of the same story.
As a reminder, a “healthy community” is not a utopian vision, but simply an observation of people as they are, not as they should be.