Self-Interest and Revolutionary Transformation

in philosophy •  7 years ago 

The consumer store is usually considered more socially valuable than the home in itself, because the store serves many people, the home only one or maximally a few.

A person generally only identifies one or two homes as 'my' home, whereas they, in an admittedly different way, identify with many shops or businesses as 'my' businesses - because I consider them PRACTICALLY USEFUL to myself.

To close down the local Walmart and turn it into a homeless shelter is in the minds of many to turn 'my Walmart' into 'their homes'.

Thus homeless people sleep in store doorways, and those with homes step over them to do their shopping.

This seems the reverse of the idealistic narrative typically aligned with the left wherein 'their walmart' should become 'our homes'.

The issue is seemingly one of identification. If you want people to put the problems of others before their own personal convenience, you need them to in some way recognise the problems of others as their problems.

The normal approach to this is by philosophy. To change people's minds by argument. But for the vast bulk of people, circumstance is 100 times more powerful than philosophy. A change of mind comes with a change of circumstance. If a person fears homelessness for themselves, they will begin to concern themselves with the well-being of the homeless. (It is an arrival at empathy by route of self-interest). You cannot expect to convert - on any large, impassioned, and thus genuinely transformative scale - economically secure people to the cause of the economically insecure.

An impractically practical way to deal with it is to change the organisation of the 'home' itself by poor people living in more tight-knit groups of interdependent individuals and families. Then, like with earlier tribal people, they really care about each other because they are an interdependent social unit.

Not to say this should be the way for everyone. Imposing it on those who don't feel the need is usually a recipe for failure in social philosophy.

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