2024-11-08: Omelas, equity, and coercion

In the spirit of my blog entries, "shower thoughts" and possibly bad takes follow.

Coercion under capitalism necessarily hinges on inequity. The fact that food and shelter cannot be obtained without work, under our current capitalist system, is less a "law of nature," as it might have been in centuries past, and more a function of those who have withholding those things from those who have not. This is, on the one hand, a driver of inequity as those who have then get to ride the power law upward and onward, while those who have not must struggle against sliding further down an inversion of the same curve, and, on the other hand, the foundation for ever-greater coercion and exploitation as the gap widens and more are forced into precarity.

Coercion itself, then must be seen through the lense of the possible, and therefore through the lense of equity. If we have to work extra hard as commoners working our collectively owned and governed land due to drought or some other natural disaster, then nothing can be said of that labor being coerced by anyone. If, on the other hand, I have more food in my storehouses than I could ever hope to need for my own sustenance, and I make distribution of that food to those who would starve without it contingent on their performing work for me, then this seems to me like a clear case of coercion under threat of starvation.

Stray (but related) thought: I've the notion that our instinctive discomfort with the sort of "utopia" described in Le Guin's The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas has to do with the fact that such a utopia would be hideously unfair and inequitable, and that our philsophical and moral systems, if they are to be any guide at all to human happiness or betterment, need to take this into account. Most people seem to have this sense; only the few and pathological can violate it and remain happy, it seems to me. I've heard that The Spirit Level) seems to support this notion, but I haven't read it.

Labor being a free choice, without coercion, would then seem to depend on all the things necessary for the sustaining of life being freely available to all, to the extent possible given the actual prevailing material conditions. Equity then seems to be a requirement for removing coercion from a society.

I don't have any solutions in mind for this beyond the knee-jerk ones that will have sprung to your mind as readily as they did to mine. I know I need to read and study more, but this relationship between equity, coercion, and our feelings about thought-experiment utopias like Omelas felt like an epiphany to me, so I wrote it down here.