Regarding Options: Access, Luck, Responsibility, and the 1st Radical Idea
#GTIdeology Rejoinder for April 21, 2016
Exploitation and entitlement are flip sides of the same coin. It belies the stereotypes associated with each: We tend to variously imagine the underclass being exploited by an entitled upper class or an entitled underclass wanting more than it deserves.
Obviously, individual perceptions here vary depending on political sway and personal experience and the language often runs to pejorative (lazy and greedy, for example). But, really, exploitation and entitlement have little to do with social classes. As with everything else, it reduces to the individual.
The fact is that a person will only exploit another if they feel entitled to do so. And (American) society, dysfunctional as it is, provides ample opportunity for any person so inclined to become entitled and exploit others.
Regarding Options
Exploitation depends on an individual lacking options that serve her or his long-run best interests, or as Jim pointed out, deprivation of meaningful knowledge of those options:
Consider an NFL free agent. If in contract negotiations a team is willing to pay up to $100 million for his services over a four year contract, but negotiates a $90 million, five year contract, the free agent has not been exploited.
He has not been exploited because he had genuine options that served his own best long-run interest. That he did not negotiate the best possible deal is nothing more than that; he was out negotiated. Likewise if he chose a different team willing to pay him $90 million for a three year contract, the original team would not be exploited by failing to obtain those services; it was simply outbid.
It has nothing to do with the size of the salary, either. The sheer size of NFL free agent salaries makes it easy to remain rational in assessing the notion of exploitation in a negotiation, but it is the principle, not the size of the salary that precludes exploitation.
Exploitation depends on a power imbalance in which one party is constrained by either lacks options that serve her or his best possible interest or is prevented from (different than failing to) gaining knowledge of the options.
One person is exploited by another any time the other pays less than market rates for the exploited person’s goods and services, based on her or his lack of other options.
The principle is this: A negotiation is only possible from free and equal positions of choice.
If only one side can walk away with other legitimate options to pursue, the other is in a position to be exploited, which brings us to the coin’s flip side: One individual cannot exploit another without the assumption that the other’s want of options entitles them to do so.
Access
Connie summed up the problem (and ultimately the solution) in one perfect word on Thursday, access:
It is really very simple. If two individuals of comparable abilities and ambitions have radically different life paths because only one had access to commensurate opportunities, the other has been exploited — deprived of best-interest, long-run options — by the social hierarchy and its structural authority. Every individual benefitting from that structural authority is complicit in the exploitation.
That such exploitation is rampant in our society is self-evident. It is equally indisputable that that some groups, both demographic and geographic, are exploited by it more than others. Both must be willfully ignored to be denied, and there is only one ground to argue otherwise, entitlement; specifically, the entitlement of those complicit in the exploitation.
From the bum to the boardroom, entitlement is most fundamentally an individual’s belief in her or his right to anything more than equal access to opportunity and a fair competition for results. Particularly at a cost to other individuals.
Too often, those claims of entitlement are based on nothing beyond luck.
Luck
There are two types of luck. Brute luck is what we might call “fate.” It involves things over which we have no control, genetics, place of birth, the weather, and so on. Option luck is the luck that befalls us because of our choices.
In day to day living, they exist on a slight continuum. We obviously have no control over whether there will be an earthquake. It’s brute luck. But being on a bridge or in a building during an earthquake is the outcome of various choices, whether to cross that bridge or be in that building, or being in a city prone to earthquakes are matters of option luck.
Which is more to blame, bad luck or bad choices? It too often depends on a person’s sense of entitlement. Its indiscrete nature is what makes luck a rationalization for entitlement.
In the case of defending one’s entitlement to access, there is a tendency both to subtly recognize brute luck while using option luck as a club to bash those not so brute lucky: “The harder I work, the luckier I get!” for example.
On the other hand, there are those who will embrace bad brute luck, particularly when it relates to exploitation, as reason to claim entitlement, ignoring how much bad luck befalls them because of poor life choices and decision making.
Responsibility
In the preface to his memoir, A Personal Odyssey, Thomas Sowell shares this:
Once, when I had listened to about as much advice from my daughter as I could stand, I asked her:
‘How do you suppose I managed to make it through this world before you were born?’
‘Luck!’ she replied.
The following pages may suggest that she had a point, at least partly.
Thomas Sowell had bad brute luck and he openly recognizes the role luck played in his life. But he does not chalk his success up to luck or deny his own hard work and assumption of responsibility for his life in his achievements.
It’s not an either/or proposition, as Tom pointed out on Thursday.
Thom and Thomas are both right. Yes brute luck impacts us. Yes institutional biases are real and hinder individuals. But ultimately, in a free society, even when it’s not free and equal, choices are vital.
It is impossible to overcome the circumstances of brute luck without assuming responsibility for option luck. And it is equally impossible to capitalize on the good luck that comes our way.
In my favorite tweet of this week’s Happy Hour, shared from his own life and pointed out that taking responsibility and overcoming bad brute luck does not mean we must deny the exploitative injustices of society, either:
The 1st Radical Idea
The fact is that, yes, there are those entitled, who won’t take responsibility. But, there are also those entitled who don’t (or won’t) realize that indeed there actually are those who try and can’t.
The GTIdeology’s 1st Radical Idea demands that we, The Skolny Organization, transcend the bipolar politics and social dysfunction to be a social role model and leader of change.
Greatness through the Individual demands that no individual ever be exploited and that no entitled person, exploitative by nature, ever be employed in the Organization.
Craig pointed out that it’s the ideal, but largely unmet. He’s not wrong. It just hasn’t been met yet.
And, yes, I’m serious.We will meet it.
About Vince Skolny
Vince Skolny founded the Skolny Organization on his radical idea that greatness is only created through the Individual. This is his weekly rejoinder to its #GTIdeology Happy Hour twitter discussion.
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