A Vision For America: Thinking About Gender, Civility, Basic Income, and Personal Responsibility

Gender

A person’s chromosomal composition can be measured as distinct from their physical appearance, i.e. genotype does not equal phenotype. Usually, the former acts as the dominant indicator for the latter but that’s not always true and we can articulate an attitude that positively includes the common and the corner cases. Physical appearance can in turn be appreciated independently of that person’s sexual orientation. Considering a relatively finite set of viable sex chromosome configurations; X, XX, XXX, XY, XXY, XYY, we can confidently say that any of those 6 types of people can appear any way they want and be sexually attracted to anyone they want. It’s become uncontroversial to say a person born XY can develop an overtly feminine demeanor very early in life and develop a post pubescent sexual attraction towards the masculine and the feminine in equal parts. There are probably XXX masculine appearing women that are sexually attracted to traditional males. We can imagine an intelligent, loving, muscular, sports enthusiastic, drag queen, father of 3 that we’d be pleased to barbecue with. Can’t we? We have thousands of fellow citizens that are non-binary, non-categorized, and refuse to conform to traditional self-presentation as a principle. No genotypical, phenotypical, or sexually orientational characteristics (excluding pedophilia and non-consentual fetishes) have any bearing on a person’s trustworthiness, their capacities for love, reciprocity, generosity, work ethic, ability to pursue truth, or capability to act as pillars for the common good. I dislike the phrase “Gender is a construct.” To me, that phrase feels like it fails to take into account what we know about the biological mechanisms of life on this planet. I prefer the phrase “Gender isn’t everything.” Judge people by the content of their character, not the content of their underwear.

Civility

A commitment to civility must come first. Your freedom ends at the tip of my nose. As long as a person is willing to promote the physical safety of everyone else. We can have as vicious philosophical fights as we like and those battles will almost invariably benefit us all. If a single person cannot make that commitment, that person is a threat to our very way of life. Having a conversation with someone that you disagree with is a skill worth developing. I know what it is to have an intelligent person explain to you that you’re wrong, to your face. Your heart races and your ears get hot. Your brain tells you that you are in PHYSICAL danger because someone is making an articulate argument against some of your beliefs, possibly your core beliefs. Considering, in real time, at the moment of recognition, the possibility that an idea you’ve held dear might be false, harmful, or both, hurts. Not only emotional hurt, it also literally physically hurts. Having my beliefs threatened causes pain in my body most of the time. My chest gets tight and my feet get cold. These types of conversations suck at first but they’re really worth it in the long run for all earnest participants. The trick is to not let these physical feelings tip you into physical violence. These are the normal feelings of learning. Learning hurts, literally. Get used to it. One problem facing America right now is that courageously engaging this type of stressful, painful, fruitful, learning has been popularly diminished while gleefully retreating from it has been made to seem as a positive. Certainly, I often hide from my fears and procrastinate the hard work that I should do. That behavior is normal and it’s bad and it will create the circumstances of its own consequence if continued long enough. The point is that we shouldn’t collectively applaud people for avoiding difficult conversations because they lack the skill to have them. We need those conversations to be had among common people that differ widely, if we are to attain more fruits from this American pluralist experiment. The expectation of physical safety is a prerequisite for many of the best forms of human flourishing. If you didn’t feel that you were physically safe at this very moment, you wouldn’t be reading this article. When your ideological opponents are committed to your physical safety and you’re committed to theirs, you can rest assured that the pain of difficult conversations will be worth the effort. P.S., this analysis only applies to live, face to face, in person conversations. Hurling scathingly witty retorts across the internet is a beast of a different kind.

Basic Income

What do we want as a species? Longevity, profitability, righteousness? It seems to me that all three of those aims have significant moral overlap. They all assume that life is worth living today and will likely be worth living tomorrow. I think personally seeking what exactly makes YOUR life worth living is an aim worth the pain. A key caveat being that the successful discovery of an encouraging, life affirming mission almost never happens overnight. Terrifically, when someone does get the wind at their back and engages with a deeply meaningful purpose in their heart, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of people benefit from their activity. How do we get more of us into that state? We give ourselves assumed ownership of our time. We’ve come to realize that no person should be allowed to claim ownership of another person’s body. It has taken many millennia of slavery to get to this point. Now, we must realize that no person should be allowed to claim ownership of another person’s time. Today’s dominant economic paradigm, which is the best one yet but still isn’t itself perfect, ostensibly requires individuals to sell the lion share of their time (and their attention, the one true currency) to someone else until they gain access to enough resources to claim full ownership of their time for a period, perhaps for the rest of their lives. This social requirement is buttressed by the threat of poverty and destitution if this sale can’t be made. The ominous proximity of poverty is better than a literal risk of starvation but an ever present sell-your-time-or-suffer-the-consequences threat is still an undesirable and possibly unnecessary part of our culture. If we remove this threat, humanity will likely express itself anew in unforeseen impressively positive ways. The implementation of this powerful economic device will not, however, present us with utopia. There will still be plenty of greed, murder, theft, hatred, laziness, ignorance, and fear to go around. What widespread basic income will bring us is a great wave of mainstream morality hinged on personal responsibility. 

Personal Responsibility

The present conditions around our births are blind luck. Who your parents are, their socioeconomic status, and the relative presence or absence of their lovingkindness towards you are immeasurably significant with regard to the adult that you are likely to become and none of those features are a consequence of any decision you had made previous. Those phenomena can aptly be described as “the cards you were dealt”. If the conditions of your birth aren’t “your fault”, at what point do the circumstances of your life become “your fault”? I’m arguing for that crossing point to be approximately 25 years old because that’s when the prefrontal cortex finishes myelinating and your capacity for adulthood can be argued as being fully developed, if you were fortunate enough to make it to that age in a relatively healthy state. Over that 2.5 decade span you transformed your luck into your responsibility one decision at a time. That time dad said “No” but you did what you wanted to do anyway, you should take full responsibility for that choice at the age of 25 at the latest.

I do believe that the future is as determined as the past. I also believe that, whatever the future will be in its fullness, the constitution of said period depends entirely on the choices we make today. Taking as complete an understanding of physical determinism as I can, individual choice remains a crucially important concept to wrestle with. Every willful action that you take significantly determines your future and will have positive and negative impacts on some aspect of the future of the people around you. Vitally, we, as sentient beings, experience the future as something variable, something coarsely under our control. We didn’t design this objective reality for ourselves. We inherited it from our creator(s) this way. These are the cards we were dealt. 

We are very lucky to be alive and competent during this technological boom known as the age of information. Increasingly, with basic income and immersive VR on the horizon, people are gaining the ability to make their “reality” whatever they choose it to be from one moment to the next. The current political polarization in America is a good example of what this glut of information can do to a previously cohesive culture. As the information becomes more abundant and more convincing, going to your neighbors house will feel eerily similar to stepping into the Twilight Zone. There’s a pernicious idea among us today that I choose to oppose as vehemently as I can. That sentiment is expressed in the phrase “I have to behave this way because {insert x number of facts here}…” That’s wrong. Absent coercion, manipulation, or blackmail, you do not “have” to act any way. You CHOOSE to act and you should take full responsibility for your choices and beliefs, especially if you’re over the age of 25. I could have gotten up early this morning and exercised. I didn’t. I could have ordered pizza for lunch. I made beans and rice. If my tissues begin to retain water due to lack of exercise and excess sodium, I’ll know who to blame. Very soon, any and every suspicion, intuition, and conspiracy theory a person may have will be an effortless set of keystrokes away from a non-negligible set of factual articles that combine to create a not unreasonable supporting narrative. If we allow our fellow citizens to abscond from taking personal responsibility for their behavior in light of the fact that they can quickly collect factual reasons and evidence to justify any imaginable course of action, we condone extremely dangerous ways of being. Ultimately, people will act any way they choose to but it’s on us to oppose their landing on the idea that they “had” to do what they did. They didn’t and we know it.