Dear Friends,
It seems to me that the reason we need lawyers in our society is that people don’t want to be held at their word. It is Hsun Ching’s maxim that the congenital nature of man is evil. By evil he meant purely selfish. Selfishness is our natural state. The civilization in us is learned.
Our civilization is learned and our selfishness is nature. The problem arises in that every incentive in our society promotes our being selfish and prevents us from being good. Take for example the child who, being a child, is out door throwing rocks. When he accidentally throws a rock through a window. The good child marches himself to the door, knocks on it and announces that he accidentally broke the window. The negative consequences flow from that virtuous act. Loss of outdoor privileges, possibly a spanking enmity from the victim of the rock incident and on and on. Now take the selfish child. He breaks the window and runs for it. If no one sees him he gets off scot free. There are no negative repercussions in his life. If he is caught he suffers no more, and probably less, than the virtuous child.
Especially the court system of the US promotes selfishness. Take for example the person who demands every right and privilege that could be afforded to him. That person enjoys a profound advantage over the person who goes along. The person who tries to be fair and honest in court is DOA. In the American court system perjury is not a high crime or a misdemeanor. It is nothing. The media and learned law professors were adamant about this point during the Clinton affair.
So if the incentives are set up to promote selfishness and our nature is selfishness then I wonder that any of us are civilized at all to any extent. The civilization in us is ground away. Yet we lament that some 20% of the population are sociopaths. They have absolutely no conscious. These people in our society have the advantage in any argument. They can screw over a friend for doing them a favor then expect him to pay for it. They are the avatar of selfishness. They don’t have the ability to see another’s point of view.
The fact is we are in a precarious situation. Our society depends on, at least some people, being honest and hard working. The problem of incentives goading people to abandon what they have learned is right must be fixed. Look at how sinuous and enmeshing the legal system has become. Like a vine that has overgrown the garden the US legal system has been fed and watered to the point that it has become a tangle that is quickly ensnaring our economy and our lives.
It is hard to hold people to any standard. We have been motivated by societal norms to be corrupt and selfish. All our lives we have been told to be good but encouraged to be corrupt. This tension passes through our entire civilization. Socrates argued against the Pre-Socratics, Rhetoratitions, and Sophists that it was the highest good to be a virtuous citizen. According to modern philosophers he won the argument. Well the argument might have been won but the battle goes on…
