Note: Originally published on Substack with the subtitle, "The war between self- and societal responsibility."
Sometime in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s, a middle aged author sat down to write a story contrasting the radical personal responsibility advocated by Ayn Rand, and the total subsumption of the individual to the state required by communism. The author sought to answer a question humans have been wrangling with in one way or another for centuries, if not millennia: Do the haves owe anything to the have-nots, and if so, what?
The author’s personal wranglings with these themes eventually became an award-winning novella titled “Beggars in Spain,” which the author, Nancy Kress, then expanded into an interesting and thought-provoking series.
The series revolves around the Sleepless, genetically engineered children whose need for sleep has been removed. Sleepless children also tend toward high intelligence and spend their extra hours, when others are asleep, studying or working.
Over time, as more and more of the Sleepless grow into their full potential, a natural stratification occurs between them and Sleepers, those tied to the dream world by the biological imperative to sleep. Not just stratification, however, but a widening gap in achievement, success, and power.
This gap is highlighted by a conversation between the main character, Leisha Camden, one of the first Sleepless, and another Sleepless, Tony Indivino, who is part of a Sleepless faction that wants to retreat from the rest of society. The conversation begins with Leisha explaining her beliefs on voluntaryism, but reduces these beliefs to the transactional nature of mutual trade and benefit.
[Leisha says,] “I believe in voluntary trade that is mutually beneficial. That spiritual dignity comes from supporting one’s life through one’s own efforts, and from trading the results of those efforts in mutual cooperation throughout society. That the symbol of this is the contract. And that we need each other for the fullest, most beneficial trade.”
“Fine,” Tony bit off. “Now what about the beggars in Spain?”
“The what?”
“You walk down a street in a poor country like Spain and you see a beggar. Do you give him a dollar?”
“Probably.”
“Why? He’s trading nothing with you. He has nothing to trade.”
“I know. Out of kindness. Compassion.”
A few paragraphs later, Tony says:
“What if you walk down that street in Spain and a hundred beggars each want a dollar and you say no and they have nothing to trade with you but they’re so rotten with anger about what you have that they knock you down and grab it and then beat you out of sheer envy and despair?…
“Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by just laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing them anything?”
The few pages containing these quotes and the intermediary discussion form the philosophical foundation for Beggars in Spain. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
I’ve been a huge fan of Beggars in Spain for many years now, since first discovering it in the mid- to late ‘90s. It’s my favorite of Kress’s many stories, probably the only one I genuinely like, and I’ve returned to it again and again in the intervening decades.
Part of the reason behind continual re-readings is that I’m an advocate for individual liberty (and it’s flip side, personal responsibility) and reject the idea that individuals are bound to uphold unwritten social contracts, particularly those requiring the theft of private property and earnings for “the greater good.” Personally, I feel that the greater good is best served by individual freedom, not slavery to the state. Revisiting Kress’s sharply contrasted characters allows me to probe my own reasoning more deeply with each successive reading, between forays into further research and contemplation.
Partly, though, the re-reading is an attempt to find some resolution on Kress’s part. In the end, she never truly commits one way or the other to either radical personal responsibility and freedom or to a total subsumption of the individual by the state. It’s as if once confronted by her own creations, she cannot choose between them; or perhaps she simply chose a middle road by shunting her more extremist characters into less than pleasant endings and allowing her main character to wander off into the wilderness.
I was reminded of Kress’s wrestling with this subject during my recent attempt to navigate the murky waters of X (formerly Twitter). In the few days I was there, my feed was flooded by (bot created?) posts supporting Universal Basic Income. UBI is touted by its proponents as a one-size-fits-all solution to poverty, the hustle culture, the evils of capitalism (and the “hoarding” of wealth by capitalists), and more, largely without any critical examination of imposed harms.
Now, I’m not going to argue my position on UBI, except to assert that such transfers of wealth amount to enslavement of the productive classes to the benefit of the non-producing aristocracy. #SorryNotSorry #ButItsTrue
I chose the word “aristocracy” deliberately because of an idea Kress captures very well in Beggars in Spain: a permanent class of Livers (what the Sleepless call “beggars”) elevated into power precisely because they outnumber the Donkeys (producers) who provide the financial support for the Livers’ hedonistic lifestyles. In Kress’s upside down future, the new aristocracy is the mass of consumers who have, through political machinations, successfully forced the financially robust to fork over a significant portion of their wealth, to be redistributed to themselves, a powerful, permanent welfare class.
The US and other Western nations are in the middle of this evolution now. The causes are too complex to analyze here, and such analysis is beyond my capabilities anyway. I’m a fiction writer, not a policy wonk, though I continue to delve into such issues, as any good citizen does.
But what we’re seeing in the West is a push toward the creation of two sharply divided classes: the Donkeys or Makers, whose main goal is the betterment of self, family, and community through the fruits of their own labor and responsible behavior; and the Livers or Takers, the beggars whose sole contribution to society is their own narcissistic sense of entitlement to someone else’s wealth.
Soon, the Livers will outnumber the Donkeys, and then we will be well and truly sunk. In order for any nation to survive, the makers must outnumber the takers. That is a simple truth proponents of expansive (and, consequently, inefficient) publicly run social welfare programs fail to consider.
Most reasonable producers (workers, innovators, and whatnot) agree that they have a moral obligation to support the poor, though when pressed, as Tony Indivino did Leisha Camden, they can’t always pinpoint an exact reason why. Some may fall back on their Christian duty, for example, or point to the times in their own lives when they needed help and none was available. Others may say, “It’s just the right thing to do.” Or as Leisha put it, “Out of kindness. Compassion.”
Nearly all support for expansive welfare programs rests on this unexamined assumption. Essentially, the haves should financially support the have nots “because morals.”
If this is so, if makers have a moral obligation to support takers, what obligation do takers have toward makers?
That question is seldom discussed, in part because it’s so uncomfortable to voice.
Of course, we should give voluntarily and out of the goodness of our hearts.
Of course, we should ease suffering whenever the opportunity to do so presents itself.
Of course, we have a social responsibility to care for the less fortunate.
Charity should never be transactional in nature. No human interaction should. When we give to others, we should expect nothing in return. This belief is, again, so intrinsically foundational that we seldom examine it too closely.
And yet, no matter how hard we try to escape it, we are reminded that we, as individuals, are part of larger market forces, some of them purely social in nature, others purely financial, and a great many comprised of both social and financial pressures, obligations that are not always named as such, but that are, nevertheless, thrust toward us with the expectation that they will be met or fulfilled. Reducing interactions, such as financial charity, to a purely transactional nature therefore seems inevitable, particularly when the nature of said interactions is fundamentally changed by government interference.
But we’re missing yet another piece of this puzzle, the idea of self-responsibility. Makers understand, often without consciously realizing it, that their primary responsibility is to their own welfare, that “spiritual dignity comes from supporting one’s life through one’s own efforts”; and that the excess should be used for good, either through savings and investment for the betterment of their heirs, or through voluntary charity.
Takers, however, believe that people shouldn’t have to work to survive, that they are owed a living by those who have amassed enough wealth to be financially stable, that indeed, they have no obligation toward others whatsoever. Not their parents or siblings, not their friends or communities, not even to themselves. They are entitled to the fruits of other people’s labor simply because they exist.
Of note here is that these particular Takers are primarily affluent Westerners compared to the truly poverty-stricken living in horrendous conditions in third world countries; nor are they, generally speaking, among the 15% of people whose intelligence is so low as to make them unemployable. These affluent Takers are thus in a class of their own, neither desperately poor or incapable, nor motivated to lift themselves out of their circumstances through the many tools made available to them, often freely, including through their own labor.
In other words, they lack any sense of responsibility and duty, either self- or social.
And that’s where a third point is often quietly voiced: What do Makers owe to the purest form of beggar known to human kind, the Takers who refuse to accept responsibility for their own lives?
To the advocates of programs like UBI, this is a moot point. In their minds, it doesn’t matter what form the Takers assume, only that the wealthy are greedy bastards who aren’t paying their “fair share” and must, therefore, be liberated of their “hoarded” wealth so that it can be redistributed to the more deserving.
But are these particular Takers more deserving? Are they really?
So long as we assign charitable functions to government and allow government agents to use force to confiscate wealth in the form of taxes, regulations, and penalties, so long as we consign the producing classes to political slavery through the threat of violence and imprisonment, then I agree: it’s a moot point whether particular individuals or groups of individuals deserve charity.
If I had a choice, I would not pay taxes and would instead donate, of my own free will, a tithe for the betterment of people in need. Since I don’t have a choice, then I would far rather that the money confiscated from me through forceful taxation should go to the truly needy, not an armchair socialist with a degree in underwater basket weaving or a welfare mom with twelve kids raking in six figures a year in entitlements. If given a choice, I would choose to do good and give that good to those most in need. Wouldn’t you?
Which leads me to another question posed all too infrequently by those demanding ever more transfers of wealth from one class of society to another: Are government subsidies the best way to help the poor help themselves? Or are there better, more balanced, and less costly means to achieve the desired end, means that don’t include government intervention in the market, the forced conscription of labor through taxation, or the creation of a permanent welfare class?
In other words, is there a way to avoid the highly stratified society Kress described in Beggars in Spain? Is such stratification inevitable? Isn’t the rise out of feudal systems, for example, evidence enough that we can do it again?
In the bits of Leisha and Tony’s conversation not quoted above, Tony says, “You see a hundred beggars and you haven’t got Leisha Camden’s money. Do you give them each a dollar?” Leisha says “no,” and when pressed, explains that doing so is “too draining on my own resources. My life has first claim on the resources I earn.”
In that simple statement, Kress strikes at the basic tension between self- and social responsibility, and of answering the deeper question posed by Beggars in Spain: Where is the fine line between giving what we can afford to give, and giving so much that we can no longer take care of ourselves?
Furthermore, when does it become immoral to take from Donkeys, the makers and producers, and give to Livers, the beggars and takers who deliberately avoid any self- or social responsibility? When do politicians say, “These folks have given enough. Time for these other ones to do for themselves.”?
The astute will notice that I’ve omitted the truly needy from the above equation. I cannot bring myself to argue entirely against (voluntary) charitable giving. There truly are people in this world who cannot fend for themselves, and they should be taken care of, voluntarily, by their families and communities.
And there are people who simply need someone to say, “Dude, I got your back.” People who need a hand up, not a handout, and we should help them, too, not with the expectation of reciprocation, but “because morals,” because of duty and honor and compassion and all the wonderful things that make humans human.
My argument is not against charitable giving, but against the involuntary servitude forced on taxpayers by the current welfare system; and certainly against the dual notions that 1) the financially affluent owe more to other people than they do to themselves, and 2) the people who receive this confiscated wealth owe nothing to those from whom that wealth was taken.
Whether we like it or not, whether we believe in the idea of “social contracts” or not (I don’t), we cannot ignore the bonds tying us to other people and the inevitable duties these bonds impose, whether through cultural beliefs and pressures, or through a sense of personal responsibility.
In the end, Leisha Camden withdrew from the Sleepless community and from the larger, more violently conflicted society encasing them, both of which ultimately rejected her, and quietly created her own space between self- and social responsibility. Regrettably, I could not include a discussion of Leisha’s twin sister, Alice, a Sleeper, as that’s another, quite fascinating rabbit hole. The lack leaves plenty for new readers to discover.
I highly recommend Beggars in Spain. It’s a richly complex story, well-told, and thought provoking on a number of levels outside the one discussed herein.