I had two eggs for breakfast this morning. It took the joint efforts of over one million people, cooperating to get me those two clean, safe, fresh eggs.
How do I get the number ‘millions?’
Start with the grocery, with its stockers, checkout staff, administrators; It took minutes or seconds of each of their work schedules to provide the two eggs safely.
Then there is the dairy sales and delivery staff and administrators, the thousands of people in the warehouses, trucking companies and finally the single farm with thousands of chickens that requires a whole ladder of workers and staff.
Then there are entire industries that bring the food to the chicken farm for the chickens and the growers in many thousands of farms that provide that chicken food. None of this counts the infrastructure that needs constant work to provide the electricity, water, gas and telecom. Tens of thousands of people are required to just do the daily maintenance. There is also a government structure involving inspectors, regulators and lawyers.
This reality has shaped my life. No ordinary Lefty and few others can see this picture clearly and honestly. Two stark realities are the backdrop for appreciation of this million person effort: Commerce and tradition.
Modern commerce is a global cooperative decent mechanism to create most of the world we live in. Commerce is the mutual voluntary beneficial exchange of goods and services that use a standard of accounting and pricing (money). I was the person that made this financial exchange a global possibility ( international credit cards.) All the underlined words are significant because commerce is the most extraordinary development of the human species that allows humans to survive and generally thrive as a large and extended species.
Although the species has internal wars, the general species survival is made possible by commerce. In contrast to the warring element, commerce is cooperative and allows the extraordinary diversity of the species to work together and cooperate. During the past century there have been many experiments in state- based planned regimented exchange systems. The USSR, Mao’s China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, North Vietnam and Cambodia. All were failures. Total failures with mass murder and starvation.
That is the first reality that honest people need to recognize and appreciate.
The second reality is that the human species builds social institutions slowly over time that allow for commercial and non-commercial cooperation. These include legal structures, family structures, language, traditions, dance, criminal reward and punishment structures, personal identities and dozens more that are invisible and substantive but not recognized.
Compare an American environment to that of a tribal Palestinian or Wolof in Senegal. The American is generally monogamous, willing to work long hours, tolerant of a wide range of other people's behavior, very unlikely to commit a crime but when he does there is a complex impersonal structure with millions of people involved to evaluate his behavior and punish him if warranted. He buys merchandise and services from the entire planet and there are large populations of fellow humans cooperatively involved to assure the safety and contractual delivery of his purchases. He has educational and health facilities readily available to him as well as access to abundant and varied food, housing and transport.
What is evident, to anyone willing to consider the matter honestly, is that the environment of an American has developed over hundreds and even thousands of years from the two tablets of Moses in Sinai to the mobile telephone transmitters within hundreds of feet of his presence anywhere. All these institutions have evolved. They were social group constructions and they were hard to come by. They are built on tradition. Tradition includes engineering that has a thousand years of testing and failures to build on.
The individual who thinks he can change, improve or modify these social creations is seriously befuddled.