The Virtue of Selfishness

Ayn Rand - in Manhattan in 1957

Ayn Rand wrote a book by that title in which she justified the selfish choices everyone makes. She went on to condemn altruism as incompatible with the requirements for human life and happiness.  She was a brilliant lady, an atheist and objectivist who insisted on "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

Selfishness is both necessary and morally right, she tells us, and a person's reasoning is the only law.

Is she right?  Is altruism just wrong thinking?

In the book, she compares the industrialist/producer with a bank robber, both pursuing personal fortune.

• The producer is virtuous, she says, despite having the same motivation of greed.  She offers us, “Yet . . . there is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery...."  She's perhaps right about the industrialist/producer, of course.
• She considers the robber's behavior to be sub-human and the producer to be noble.
• She encourages the wealthy to pursue more, motivated by healthy greed.
• And personal sacrifice is abhorrent.

So, did she notice that business motivated by such greed is likely to be abusive?   We know that problems may arise when you consider the capitalist model in which the industrialist operates.

• The industrialist/businessman can look exactly like the robber with the only difference between the two being the legality (or illegality) of their behavior.  
• It is illegal to rob a bank.  
• It is legal, however, 
• to underpay employees, 
• to limit hours to avoid paying benefits, 
• to avoid regulatory compliance by offshoring artificial transactions, 
• to target (neuromarketing) advertising to children, 
• to misrepresent (lie about) a product's value and utility, 
• to extract wealth from the economy without providing benefit in return.

Is business good or bad?  To be fair, there are those who innovate and improve our world, and there are those in business who do harm.  Some contribute wonderfully, and some suck the life out of us.  It would appear that Rand's observations of greedy business were perhaps idealistic, ignoring the depth of unconscionable practices common in the business community even during her formative years.  The only 'ethical' criteria applied to such practices was (and is) profitability and avoidance of legal repercussions.

She arrived at her basic thinking as a teenager, she tells us.  Born in 1905 in Russia to a middle class family, she and they were devastated by the revolutions of the time.  The family business was confiscated, and they were driven from their home.  They fled for their lives, nearing starvation on multiple occasions before finally settling in the U.S.  Today ...

"Her ideas permeate contemporary American policies and institutions. Hundreds of former protégés, including Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, Libertarian Party founder John Hospers, former Barron’s editorial director Robert Bleiberg, and best-selling psychologist of self-esteem Nathaniel Branden, lead government agencies, publications, corporations, and popular movements. Forbes and Fortune regularly mention Rand as a present-day hero of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Television hosts and Tea Party activists invoke her name. Hundreds of campus study groups and clubs continue to debate her views."

“A trader,” she writes, “is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.  He does not treat men as masters or slaves, but as independent equals.  He deals with men by means of a free, voluntary, unforced, uncoerced exchange - an exchange which benefits both parties by their own independent judgment.”

Ah, there we come to the heart of the matter.  Ayn Rand is quite clear that her view of capitalism is precise and ideal and virtually unrelated to modern business practices.  There is nothing wrong with capitalism, but capitalists can be lying, murderous sub-humans, not unlike the bank robber in her earlier description.

Wealth distribution in America in the years since Ayn Rand

"Pure capitalism," she concludes, "has never existed: but in the countries that approached it, with America in the second half of the nineteenth century leading the way, the individual was able to flourish. This is because capitalism is the only system that fully recognizes that man is the rational being who 'has the right to exist for his own sake,' free from coercion by others."   

And there you have it.  We perhaps came close, briefly. Ayn Rand died in 1982, just as explosive inequality and the GAP began to infect the world marketplace.  The nation she knew had been growing with opportunity for most.  Subsequent years saw opportunity and gains going exclusively to the wealthiest 10% at the expense of everyone else.

I don't agree with Rand and her followers on many issues, but on this one point (and perhaps only this one), we agree.

"We've never seen pure capitalism."  

Perhaps that's because there are no pure capitalists, and some (not all, but some) are these greedy sub-humans that are willing to get rich at the expense of other's lives, literally.

As for altruism, well that's another story entirely. I suspect she may have disagreed with herself on that one. 
Thanks and a hat tip to my friend Joel for provoking this re-review.

Note: Ayn Rand is rather famous for being slightly off the mark in her attacks. Take a look at her website and see if you can spot any misidentification of opposing values and subsequent off-target responses.

By way of example, she tells us her opinion of the communists who took over her homeland when she was a child; "The advocates of collectivism are motivated not by a desire for men’s happiness, but by hatred for man . . . hatred of the good for being the good; . . . the focus of that hatred, the target of its passionate fury, is the man of ability." 

Notice how, as she attacks this group, ...

• she ascribes a root motive (hatred for man),
• then she ascribes a behavioral rationale (hatred of the good for being good), 
• and identifies a hypothetical innocent victim (their target ,,, the man of ability) 
• for the group's irrational and evil behavior (that hatred, passionate fury).   

She passes judgement on the basis of her critique, but each attribution is oddly unreasonable and unsupported by available evidence.  Still, she's popular, and not for her objectivity but for her literature; all wonderfully illustrative and engaging.  Needless to say, she's been a controversial voice.

Academic philosophers have mostly ignored or rejected Rand's philosophy.^[ref]  Nonetheless, Objectivism has been a significant influence among libertarians and American conservatives.^[ref]

Thoughts on her contribution to our culture?

Rising Inequality

Rising Inequality: How to Reverse It.


DEVELOPMENT & SOCIETY : Sustainability, Poverty, Economics, Social Development
2014•11•10 Annett Victorero and Dominik Etienne, United Nations University

The last decade has witnessed a revival of concern over the impact of high-income concentration on economic development and wellbeing. The global distribution of income has for decades resembled a ‘champagne glass’, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Distribution of world GDP, by quintiles; richest 20% top, poorest bottom. Source: Ortiz and Cummin (UNICEF, 2011).

Today, the top 20 percent receive more than 70 percent of the global income, and the top 1 percent (70 million people) earn as much as the poorest 3.5 billion people — that is half the world population. Some positive news can be found, for example in the case of Latin America, but progress is much too slow. At the current rate of progress it would take 800 years for the bottom quintile to get even 10 percent of the global income.

To discuss why it is crucial to integrate the economic equity perspective into national and international development processes, UNU-WIDER, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) organized a policy seminar and shared examples of policies that have worked.

On 23 October more than 50 representatives of over 20 international organizations — among them 13 UN agencies and bodies — and permanent missions to the UN joined in the discussions with an expert panel consisting of Isabel Ortiz, Richard Kozul-Wright and Giovanni Andrea Cornia. The meeting was chaired by Tony Addison, Deputy Director and Chief Economist of UNU-WIDER.

Inequality must be a cornerstone of the development agenda post-2015

According to Ortiz the case for equity is now enormous; it is not only about social justice. Equity contributes to growth and builds political stability. Indeed some countries in Asia and Latin America have been focusing on cutting inequality in order to foster national demand and consumption.

But in order to bring equity into the development agenda and policy advice of international organizations the key will be to mainstream it systematically into all sectors — from agriculture, education and health to finance, trade, industry and others (Figure 3). It is not enough to simply be undertaking a few interventions in selected areas.

Sector	Typical interventions with equitable outcomes	Typical interventions with inequitable/regressive outcomes
Education	Universal free education; scholarships and programmes to retain students	User fees; commercialization of education; cost-saving in teacher’s salaries
Energy and Mining	Rural electrification; life-line tariffs (subsidized basic consumption for low- income households); windfall social funds; contract laws ensuring local benefits from natural resources	Untaxed oil/mineral extraction
Finance	Regional rural banks; branching out to local areas; managing finance (regulating financial and commodity markets, capital controls)	Financial liberalization; rescue of banking system (transfers to large banks); subsidies to large private enterprises
Health	Universal primary and secondary health services; nutrition programmes; free reproductive health services	User fees; commercialization of health; tertiary highly specialized clinics that benefit a few (e.g. cardiology centers)
Housing	Subsidized housing for lower income groups; upgrading of sub-standard housing	Public housing finance for upper income groups
Industry	Technology policy to support competitive, employment-generating domestic industries, SMEs	Deregulation; general trade liberalization
Labour	Active and passive labour programmes; employment-generating policies	Labour flexibilization

 These excerpts are from a longer article that first appeared in WIDERAngle newsletter.  United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER).  This work is licensed under a CC BY NC SA 3.0 IGO License.  Included here for perspective on shared concerns.

Progress!

See the problem?

In 1820, survival was difficult and most of the world was harshly poor.  Perhaps 900+ million lived in what is today described as absolute poverty, living on less than the equivalent of $2 per day.

After almost a hundred years, we've made incredible progress, but now there are more than one billion in that poverty grouping.  There are more people in deadly poverty today than there were a century ago.

Population has grown, of course.  There are 7 times as many people in the world than there were in 1820.  One reason for the growth, a smaller percentage of people in absolute poverty means folks are living longer and children are more likely to survive to adulthood.  That part is encouraging, of course.

How much folks have to live on - from 2015 data for population, productivity, and share.

On the less encouraging side, we still have hundreds of millions who are left out of the progress so many of us enjoy.  It is difficult to grasp the life circumstances they face.  It's hard to imagine holding your children in your arms and knowing you don't have enough food for them.  We've made progress; the problem can be solved.

In a world filled with difficult challenges, dealing with human suffering should perhaps be at the top of the list.

Thoughts on the subject?

BREXIT

Should I stay or should I go?  The UK is in the process of deciding whether to leave the EU or stay.  Being a member has changed their view of themselves as a nation; their identity has been diluted, according to some.  Economic issues, sovereignty issues, political and ideological issues ... and the migrants.

One party supporting Brexit ('Britain's Exit' from the EU) has published the poster (right).

It has been displayed in the media, on billboards, and on the sides of busses, suggesting that refugee immigrants are the last straw in the decision to abandon the EU.  Sound familiar?

Parties opposed to leaving the EU have pointed out the incitement to racial discrimination, segregation, and an abandonment of humanitarian values.  It has even been noted for similarity to Nazi propaganda. The offered arguments are indeed similar and perhaps equally misleading.

The UK discussion on the EU sounds much like the run-up to the election in the states this year.  People here are voting 'with their middle finger', as one southern gentleman has suggested.  And the migrants are an emotional issue. One commentator offers that folks are fed up with 'experts' on economics and politics and with lack of representation.  Exaggerated fear mongering is everywhere.

Times of distress, particularly economic distress, can cloud common thinking on the issues.  The stakes are raised as national impetus for a solution escalates.  In Germany following WWI and the Great Depression, times were hard, and it was a perfect opportunity for popular change.  In retrospect, we see how people lost contact with reality and bought into the promises of the National Socialists.  They blamed their problems on one ethnic minority and became participants in the outcome, a perhaps cautionary reminder.

We have perhaps some choice in the matter, at least in our own thinking.  There is no single decision, no one politician that will resolve all the difficulties and return things to an easier form.

For the record, most difficulties we face today have developed over decades, and are unlikely to be fixed by some knee-jerk popular choice or simple decision.  It's worthwhile to be thoughtful in our choice of leaders and representatives, and we, at least, needn't be fear mongers.

(In the U.S., the fact that neither presidential candidate is particularly appealing is troublesome, but they aren't the only contest being decided on the ballot.)

What's on my mind? Orlando.

49 killed, 53 injured by gunman in Orlando nightclub

While speculation in the media abounds, we know that neither religion nor gun regulations are the cause.

In the news, one candidate blames the Muslims, another blames the gun laws, and someone raises the issue of inadequate mental health care as the cause. Despite the claims of leaders who, for whatever purpose, blame this group or that, science has demonstrated that the phenomenon of 'us against them' is rooted in selfishness and in fear of loss.

Confusing cause and effect, it's easy to suggest that Islam is the cause of terrorism.  Similarly, we could say that Christianity caused folks to crusade and slaughter for hundreds of years. Both cases, however, are examples of extremist thinking by leadership and by followers, perhaps many of whom are deceived. By the time such behavior is chosen, the ideological origin has been morphed and adapted by the participants.  What follows is from power players, broken values, and corruption.

'Self above others' and 'self at the expense of others' are normally identified and corrected, at least initially, during the childhood years by family and community.

When a culture (whether political, religious, or national) supports the standard, peace follows as we saw along the Niger river for more than a thousand years.

When a culture fails the standard, the culture is warped violently, and civilization is at risk.*

Guess what the solution might be. :)**

Norman Rockwell's painting reminds us, the ethic

of reciprocity and tolerance is taught in every major

religion.  That's every major religion including Islam.

*E.g.: 'self above others' and 'self at the expense of others' give us racial discrimination, religious discrimination and persecution, class discrimination and elitism, intolerance, political polarization, oppression, disenfranchisement, and social ostracism. And bullying. It's all deadly.  

A civilization's fall, while not precisely predictable, appears to be inevitable, and with an average lifespan of around three centuries.  So the folks living along Africa's Niger river were a persistent civilization for more than a thousand years, how did they do that?

**Next question: at the very core of self and identity, what does it take to change us for the better?

Science tells us we're all bent this way or that, and most of the time, we're not even aware that our thinking is less than objective, that our judgement is self-serving, and that our criticism of others is often inaccurate and unwarranted. So what's the way out?





You might appreciate: Civilization's Reasonable Rise and Cities Without Citadels

Paying attention

"Did you notice?  You have to look back just a bit.  For nearly 50 years, as our country got richer, our families got richer -- and as our families got richer, our country got richer.

And then about 30 years ago, our country moved in a different direction. New leadership attacked wages. They attacked pensions. They attacked health care. They attacked unions. And now we find ourselves in a very different world from the one our parents and grandparents built. We are now in a world in which the rich skim more off the top in taxes and special deals, and they leave less and less for our schools, for roads and bridges, for medical and scientific research -- less to build a future." Elizabeth Warren

While I don't share Senator Warren's political leanings, she's correct.  Do your own research on changes in wealth, income, inequality, family, etc.  Take a look at The century's deadliest idea.

And yes, J.P.Morgan is one of the players responsible for the economic difficulties that plague
most of the world.  They received billions from government bailout programs so they could
stay in business. They spend millions each year on political contributions (purchasing
legislation) and millions more on lobbying. They have a voice in our government
while the typical citizen (non-billionaire) does not.

Real income, inflation adjusted        

Inequality in the U.S. in both income and total wealth is higher than most developed countries.  The effects of such disproportion are now visible as change in both the economy and in the culture.

What might those effects be?

• A decline of the middle class
• A decline of economic mobility
• Stagnant wages for the bottom 90%
• Persistent poverty in the lowest quintile
• An accelerating gap between the top quintile and all the rest
• Increase in corruption and white collar crime
• Increase in urban crime and incarceration 
• Increase in wage and benefit theft by employers
• Decline in integrity in the financial sector
• Decline in fiscal stability for middle class communities and urban regions
• Economic abuse of the working poor
• Increased impediments to economic advancement by minorities
• Widening quality gap between the top decile and the rest for quality of services available; e.g., education, healthcare, security, representation

So how might we minimize the damage and correct our course forward?

Suffer through it

Rembrandt - St. Paul in Prison

So how long did the apostle Paul spend in prison?  Maybe six years or so.

But why?

Well for one thing, that's how he had the time to write the prison letters; e.g., the letters to the church in Galatia, in Ephesus, in Colossae, in Philippi; he had a lot of time on his hands, so he wrote and it changed the world.

Was it worth it?  In the end, it did cost him his life.  We each have to make our own decision about that, I suppose.

So is there perhaps more purpose to our lives.  Might we find opportunity to serve well while we're in this less than ideal place, less than pleasant job, less than perfect city, country, world????  Of course.



Thanks and a hat tip to OFH for the reminder.

ISIS, atheists, and others

There's always more,
 perhaps infinitely
 more ...
   

It never occurred to me as a kid that the world might be limited to the size of my understanding. We always knew there was more. Perhaps our father taught us that.

Later in life, when I encountered angry atheists, and similarly angry religious folks, I didn't understand the anger. If we think differently, must we be mad about it?

Then I saw that anger tends to spring up and perhaps violence as well between any groups that disagree about anything.  Are we supposed to hate those who are working from some different starting point than we?  Brawling soccer fans come to mind.

A quick look at ideological violence (from a somewhat objective distance):

ISIS (and Al Qaeda before them) have horrified the world with their violent extremes.  The public face of Islam they offer (their extremist version) is inhumanly brutal, and murderous.  It's minimally related to religion and is more decipherable as a narrowed response to the diversity and ambiguity of the world's cultures.  It's much like the Crusades a thousand years ago.  In fact, it's virtually identical, but more about that in a moment.

I spent a couple of years corresponding with ex-Christians.  Most were furiously anti-church, anti-religion, anti-bible, etc.  Each, it appeared, had been badly treated by fundamentalist religion. Demanding and judgemental, criticism and condemnation, and destructive exclusion, these were common in their various personal stories.  They had been expected to listen and agree and comply with the teachings without question.  Christianity makes no provision for such practice.  Of course.

The question for us all, are we supposed to hate each other if we don't agree?  Do we have a choice in the matter of how we respond?

We could just continue killing and hating and justifying it, I suppose.   Did you know that killing someone* is morally neutral, as long as your intentions are good?  Not true, of course, but that was the published and accepted rationale in the early years of so called 'Christian warfare'.

• 400 A.D.  Augustine gave us a narrow definition for a 'just war'.  Later, Thomas Aquinas further explained, it must be a war with good intent, expressing the love of God, and without desire for gain.  Despite their attempts at reason and restraint ...

The definition of holy war went downhill.  Leadership of 'the church' became national authority and corrupt, indistinguishable from secular government and empire.  A couple of interesting doctrinal changes they made:

• 1) Violence in holy war is morally neutral rather than evil, leaders decided. The offered analogy is to a surgeon, who cuts into the body, thus injuring it, in order to make it better and healthier.

• 2) Christ is concerned with the political order of man, and intends for his agents on earth, kings, popes, bishops, to establish on earth a Christian Republic that is a 'single, universal, transcendental state’ ruled by Christ through the magistrates he endowed with authority.**  That was the offered propaganda.

Defending that Christian Republic against God’s enemies, whether foreign infidel or domestic heretics and Jews became a moral imperative.  A Crusade became a holy war fought for the recovery of Christian property or defense of the Church or the Christian people. It could be waged against Turks in Palestine, Muslims in Spain, pagan Slavs in the Baltic, or heretics in southern France, all of whom were enemies or rebels against God.

Christianity makes no provision for such behavior, just the corrupted, propagandized version.

• So, in 1099 A.D.   The First Crusade deploys around 20,000 combatants and captures Jerusalem, massacring its inhabitants, Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. The Crusaders divide up their new territories, and Godfrey of Bouillon is named “defender of the Holy Sepulcher” and ruler of Jerusalem.

And that brings us to ISIS today.  And to polarized politics, polarized religion and anti-religion, and to conflict in modern life.  From mild to vicious and deadly, conflict persists today for reasonless reasons, killing and hating and justifying it.  It is perhaps the easy response to fear and perceived threat.***

Might God have a different opinion on the subject, and can we understand?  If we have any choice in the matter, that would be information worth pursuing, even if it took a lifetime ... or we can just exist, crippled by fear and anger and hatred as so many apparently do.

Beyond ourselves, we must introduce our children to the good path since they'll face the same world every day.  If we don't teach them well, they'll spend a lifetime fighting their own way out, won't they.  :)




If you have other thoughts on any of this, feel free to offer a critique.
*** Here is some info on why conflict happens and how it works.
**   The Crusades: a history by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of Cambridge
*     Thanks and a hat tip to Dr. Richard Abels, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis.

Micro or Macro Society

Where we live affects who we are and how we think.

Case 1:  Bigger is not necessarily better.  The larger the social context in which we live, the greater the risk of isolation and impersonal relationships. Large scale social institutions replace traditional community involvement, and they remove our personal investment in social efforts.  Things that used to be handled by neighbors or by a local committee are now relegated to some impersonal government office and program.

The larger the social context, the more we tend to be observers, untouched by the lives we see and by the things that happen.  We tend to spend our lives walking by on the other side of the street.

Mass society, mass media, mass market, massive mindlessness.

As the mass media ramps up, our personal involvement in the public forum is generally seen as of little value.  You can't really speak louder than the talking heads.  There's no venue where your voice matters much these days unless you're mega-wealthy.

Case 2:  The greater the social and economic inequality, the less voice most individuals will have in their own lives and country.  The problem is not being poor, although that is deadly enough.  The problem is having no voice or power to affect any change for yourself or your family.  Your children are in the forefront of your mind as the priceless treasure they are and for whom you cannot do anything no matter how hard or how long you work to make a difference.  That's the brutality of persistent inequality.

How hard can it be?

So among those things which disengage, demoralize, and demotivate a culture ... we find western norms. Mass media, mass programs, and massive economic inequality, all are common in post-industrial developed economies.

Normal life less than a century ago included deeply connected neighbors, communities, families, towns and villages ...  even states were cohesive and culturally distinguishable...



... but not so much anymore, and now we perhaps understand; that's why we fight being thoughtlessly conformed to the world.*






So how might we adjust our focus to improve our own thinking and for the good of others?


*It's a relatively controversial phenomenon called mass society.  Much useful conversation while the academics debate the processes.

____________________________________

Carl Jung stressed the importance of individual rights in a person's relation to the state and society. He saw that the state was treated as "a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected" but that this personality was "only camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it",^[a] and referred to the state as a form of slavery.^[1][2][3][4]  He also thought that the state "swallowed up [people's] religious forces",^[b] and therefore that the state had "taken the place of God" -- making it comparable to a religion in which "state slavery is a form of worship".^[c]  Jung observed that "stage acts of [the] state" are comparable to religious displays: "Brass bands, flags, banners, parades and monster demonstrations are no different in principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades and fire to scare off demons".^[d] From Jung's perspective, this replacement of God with the state in a mass society led to the dislocation of the religious drive and resulted in the same fanaticism of the church-states of the Dark Ages -- wherein the more the state is 'worshipped', the more freedom and morality are suppressed;^[5] this ultimately leaves the individual psychically undeveloped with extreme feelings of marginalization.^[6]

Was he right?

Leave me alone

The multi-billion dollar advertising industry is aggressive, persistent, conscienceless, and apparently impervious to reality.

Targeted advertising aims to sexualize our teens and tweens.  It aims to make folks obese and materialistic.  It insists that merchandise is immediately perishable and needs to be replaced regularly. They're somewhat successful, since they're getting paid.  A lot.  But they're lagging behind reality.

They haven't noticed that direct mailings have produced a less favorable response for twelve consecutive years.  The USPS total is approaching 140 billion pieces sent per year, almost half of which will go straight to the trash. They've missed the fact that no one wants to get their marketing emails or robo-calls.  They haven't a clue why TV ads are ignored or skipped.  Catch a customer on a bad day, and they'll report you to the FTC and the Better Business Bureau.

The second most destructive industry in America after the financial corporations, they are the enemy of health, reason, and meaningful life. Fortunately, most in the emerging generation have figured it out.  They're smarter than their parents; annoyance is apparently instructive.

The Majority

This is Nusrat; she's just 8 years old.  Her family is homeless in Mumbai, so she does her studies
on a sidewalk in the city, and she supplements the family income by rag picking.  Her family's
circumstances are not of their choosing; such inequality is done to you. Where she lives,
she is guaranteed a more difficult path, but still, she wants so badly to learn.

                                     Equality is not yet.  Nor is justice. 

We've been unable to locate the family.
Photograph: Arko Datta/Reuters 20070831

Worldwide, about 31 million girls of
primary school age aren't in school,
and about half the world's children
(about 1 billion) live in poverty.

White.  That's the only majority with which I've been affiliated, and we've had our moments.

I was walking on the beach with a staffer from the embassy in western Africa, and I was ruminating aloud on the problems associated with being white.  Meetings are awkward, relationships can be clumsy, and a straight answer is hard to get.  I said something like I wished I was black for such occasions.  My friend fell to the sand, laughing so hard he had difficulty breathing.  "You have no idea," he finally managed to say, laughing and wiping away tears, "how many times I've wished I was white, and for much the same reasons."

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't survive long in this world as one against whom discrimination is the daily norm. I don't think I could endure it. And I couldn't face a life where my children were guaranteed a more difficult path and where opportunity was bent in favor of some privileged group in which they weren't welcome.

But I would gladly live in a world where justice is real, especially for the children's sake.  Dear Father, especially for their sake.

Wouldn't you? So then, what might we do to make a difference?

Curious what life might be like in the real world?

2013 - Our friends were evicted again.  They were living on lands their tribe had owned and occupied for more than a century when the government sold it out from under them and bulldozed their homes.  They moved further into the tribal region and rebuilt their simple homes.  After a couple of years, the government did it again.  They'd sold the land to some wealthy folks.  Ethiopia did better; our friends there were relocated from their tribal lands but they were provided new apartments at low cost.

2014 - Our friend needed his secondary school transcript so he could go to trade school, but the official wouldn't give it unless he was paid a bribe.  He held out for awhile.  A local pastor, a reputable bishop, went to the office and firmly explained to the agent that he was to provide the transcript, which he finally did. (Kenya)  According to survey, the average Kenyan household pays 17 bribes per month for everything from getting their children a seat in school to getting a building permit.

2016 - A young fellow whom we've known since he was a kid found himself in a bind.  He and his partner had been granted 4 hectares (about 10 acres) of land to develop agriculturally.  After they had invested time and money for equipment and cleared the land, the new government minister rescinded the grant and confiscated their equipment.  They lost a couple of years work and all their savings. It's devastating for the extended family, and moving on is difficult.  (western Africa)

In America, if you're poor, you're probably trapped in it, but it's a different framework.  Minimum wage is about half of what it was intended to be, education is required but difficult to complete if you're poor, and advanced education is likely to indenture you for a decade or more.

Any ideas?