Memes that suck: Thomas Sowell v. John Donne
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.- John Donne, Meditation 17, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
We share this world:
My ears hear the bell you hear,
Resonances: ours.
The air: ours! Each of our cochlear curls
Dance to sound waves through each cell.
Our world is our home.
Every island knows our shared Sun’s powers —
So do we, like walking flowers
Our footfalls by this world known.
It smiled at each clod we dislodged, each shell
Placed to the ears of boys and girls.
© 2022, Tom Tordillo, All Rights Reserved.
My social media feed gets inundated with conservative commentary like this sometimes:
Unless we each live on separate planets (“islands,” in Donne’s reckoning), decisions by one person usually affect other people. In an interconnected world, it’s rare for a person to pay no price for their decision, and in a modern economy.
Sowell is not a fan of that interconnectedness, but instinctively, it’s fundamental — not just in nature, but in any form of economics accurately reflecting nature. Every corporation separates ‘owners’ who bear the risk from ‘managers’ who operate the company. Even if these are the same people, legally, they are treated as being separate — and thus able to bear totally different liabilities as a result of decisions. That’s the entire purpose of a corporation, in every system that ever had one.
Odd to suggest it is “idiotic.”
Sowell has written 45 books or so, and has qualified what he means in this statement — but memes do not convey the depth of his theory.
Yet the basic notion of having ‘skin in the game’ associated with Sowell implies, contra Donne, that the “bell rings for one person but not for others.
‘Conservative/libertarian’ thinkers like Sowell propose that ‘progressives’ are unrealistic utopians, with a propensity for trying to build a perfect world while actually making things worse. However, the strand of libertarianism Sowell proposes is one that offers a ‘free market’ utopia — where humans are perfectly honest, perfectly informed, and in which technology, shipping, and energy costs are irrelevant to perfectly rational decision-making…sort of like Darth Vader criticizing Sauron for being unrealistic…
Let’s fix Sowell’s silly statement and align it with John Donne’s meditation (and with modern chaos mathematics, which assumes that every action in a shared system influences the system for everyone residing within it):
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by assuming the people making those decisions have considered anyone other than themselves. When people do make decisions without considering others, errors will always impose costs and consequences that spread to all of us.
More succinctly: this is our world, and the bell tolls for us all.
