C. S. Lewis once observed something that rang very true for me. In his book God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, Lewis wrote:
This is certainly true in my own life. The difficulties inflicted upon me by bad actors who willfully wanted to make me worse off are a tiny fraction of the difficulties I have endured by people who were genuinely convinced they were being helpful and were acting with (what they judged as) my “best interests at heart.”
I don’t think this experience is unique to me, of course. A surreal but not at all rare sight to see is when alleged “beneficiaries” seek to escape from those who view themselves as benefactors. I recently remembered a silly fictional example of this from a review of the game Resident Evil 5. For readers of this blog who aren’t into video games, Resident Evil is a series of horror games largely revolving around zombie outbreaks and bioweapons. When reviewing this game for his Zero Punctuation web series, game critic Yahtzee Croshaw had the following gripe about the AI programing that controlled your in-game partner:
That part of the review made me laugh out loud. I had also largely forgotten it until I read the following real-world example of the same phenomenon from the book Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry by Jill Esbenshade. In this book, she describes her encounters with workers in Chinese sweatshops and she is surprised to find that she isn’t viewed as a benevolent helper the way she expected:
We find almost every violation in the book. The workers are pulling 90-hour weeks. The place has no fire extinguishers or fire exits, and is so jammed full of material that a small fire could explode into an inferno in a minute. There are no safety guards on the sewing machines, and the first-aid boxes hold only packages of instant noodles.
With the bosses out of earshot, I fully expect the workers to pour out their sorrows to me, to beg me to tell the consumers of America to help them out of their misery. I’m surprised at what I hear.
“I’m happy to have this job,” is the essence of what several workers tell me. “At home, I’m a drain on my family’s resources. But now, I can send them money every month.”
I point out that they make only $100 a month; they remind me that this is about five times what they can make in their home province. I ask if they feel like they’re being exploited, having to work 90 hours a week. They laugh. “We all work piece rate here. More work, more money.”
The worst part of the day for them, it seemed, was seeing me arrive. “I don’t want to tell you anything because you’ll close my factory and ruin any chances I have at having a better life one day,” one tells me.
Rules of thumb are not perfectly accurate, but they are generally useful. And a good rule of thumb for would-be social reformers and helpers is this – if the person or people you think you are helping seem like they are desperate to get away from you, you should seriously consider the possibility that you’re not as helpful as you like to think. Other people are generally better than you are at knowing their own circumstances, preferences, and what would be in their own best interests. Tormenting someone “for their own good” is still torment – and I would never want to be the kind of person who can treat people that way with an unburdened conscience.
And if you find yourself beset upon by the kind of person Lewis warned about, a good rule of thumb on how to handle them, in my opinion, comes from Robert Heinlein’s Notebooks of Lazarus Long:
Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.
READER COMMENTS
robc
Sep 11 2023 at 12:22pm
I have credited CS Lewis as the primary influence on me becoming a libertarian. And God in the Dock would be the primary source from Lewis.
nobody.really
Sep 11 2023 at 12:33pm
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
David Henderson
Sep 11 2023 at 1:16pm
Excellent post. As I put it in various articles on sweatshops, “When you take away the best option from people who have lousy options and chose the best, you make them worse off.”
Also, as I put it when activists were trying to shut down sweatshops, “The person who tries to get you fired–is not your friend.”
G. L.
Sep 11 2023 at 1:54pm
Two of the most important things I’ve learned since going down the econ rabbit hole (as an engineer with only one worthless college econ class) are that sweatshops and price gouging improve peoples lives. Both seemed counterintuitive at first, but now I’m shocked at how hard it is to convince people of what seem like obvious truths to me. It certainly isn’t counterintuitive to think that getting fired and supply shortages are bad.
steve
Sep 11 2023 at 8:34pm
Strikes me as a good example of not understanding foreign cultures. Do gooders trying to change stuff not knowing the norms cause trouble. Long hours are normal in China. My daughter and son-in law moved to China for his job. They usually come in at 9 AM and work until 9 PM. They always work Saturdays and Sundays are hit and miss.It frustrates him since US engineers get more done in a 40-45 hour week than they do. Anyway, in that culture 90 hours isn’t such an aberrancy. Heck, I spent years working more than 90 hours a week but it was a cultural norm. 90 hours in Germany would raise eyebrows.
Lewis writes nice prose but I think a guy raised with private tutors and schools who made his living writing and living in academia probably had no real idea what it was like to work for robber barons. Nice prose, appreciate the sentiment, could be true but would much rather hear from the people who actually worked for robber barons.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Sep 12 2023 at 9:52am
I seem to recall someone here mentioning a book of diary entries and letters from workers at the time discussing how preferable these Robber Baron jobs were compared to farming. I can’t find it quickly, but I’m sure it was just this past summer that it was discussed.
steve
Sep 12 2023 at 11:30am
I am not sure what we would learn by comparing a job like coal mining for a robber baron vs farming unless there were farming robber barons. Then you need to compare it to the supposed harms caused by the busybodies. For example, the moral busybodies in our area passed blue laws (now gone) so I couldn’t by beer on a Sunday which sucked. OTOH, robber barons, some of them, took advantage of their relative wealth and political power to force people to work for free on their supposed days off or took advantage of female house help knowing that it would be consequence free. Lewis would have been affected by blue laws, but would not have been forced into positions to provide non-consensual sex or work for free.
I also think people falsely assume that every coal mine owner, factory owner or steel mill owner was a robber baron. Most weren’t and treated their workers fairly by the standards of the age. It was a minority that was abusive.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Sep 12 2023 at 11:51am
Well, the biggest would be which is preferable to the worker, just like with the sweatshop example discussed.
nobody.really
Sep 12 2023 at 12:56pm
How do we know this? I ask because this proposition lies at the heart of some libertarian disputes.
1: Imagine that the robber baron owners of coal mines, factories, or steel mills secretly use undetectable chemicals in their operations that enhance productivity but will kill their employees by the age of 70. If would-be employees were aware of this fact, they would refuse to work there, or at least demand much higher compensation. But they aren’t, so they don’t. The existence of one/some firms engaging in this practice may effectively compel the entire industry to do likewise—unless some mechanism can be achieved to cause all firms to abandon this practice uniformly.
2: A shop owner may oppose racial discrimination, but nevertheless excludes black people from his shop because his livelihood depends upon the patronage of people in the town who demand racial discrimination. The existence of some shops that exclude black people may effectively compel the entire industry to do likewise—unless some mechanism can be found to cause all firms to abandon the practice uniformly.
3: Drugs may help athletes perform better, but at the cost of incurring long-term health damage. The existence of some athletes that use performance-enhancing drugs may effectively compel the entire industry to do likewise—unless some mechanism can be found to cause all athletes to abandon the practice uniformly.
Libertarians are prone to say that every regulation impinges upon autonomy—but in competitive situations, regulation would seem to enhance at least some people’s autonomy.
Note that in each case, a regulation would arguably operate to the detriment of the consumer (or, at least, some consumers): Consumers might get cheaper products if manufacturers could simply deceive their employees. Racist customers might get to enjoy shopping without the fear of encountering black people if employers could pander to them. Fans might enjoy more remarkable athletic achievements if the athletes were driven to sacrifice their long-term health. Does this fact suggest that regulation would be unwise/unwarranted, and that such matters should be left to the market?
Richard Fulmer
Sep 13 2023 at 2:27am
In the intro to his book, “The Underground Lawyer,” Michael Minns, tells the story of his grandfather who started a store in East Texas during the Great Depression.
He stocked his shop with goods and appliances that he’d bought for pennies on the dollar from stores across the country that had gone bankrupt. As a result, he had the lowest prices in town. There was only one problem. This being East Texas during the 1930s, African Americans were not allowed to enter stores through the front door; they had to use the back. Minns, however, let all his customers in through the front door.
This did not sit well with the more civic-minded of the townspeople, so they called for a boycott of Minns’ store. That might have worked, except that he had the lowest prices in town, and white people started entering the store from the back door so that they wouldn’t be seen.
At that point, the town notables took more direct action, beginning with petty vandalism.
In response, Minns went to the town’s largest bank and took out a $1,000 loan, which in those days was serious money. He didn’t do anything with it other than deposit it in a bank in San Antonio.
Finally, the vandalism escalated to a cross burning in front of his house. Minns went back to the bank and informed its president that he was going to have to default on the loan.
Shocked, the president asked if his store was in trouble. Minns replied that business had never been better, but that he couldn’t stay in town because of the danger to his family. The president said that he hadn’t heard of any of the incidents (which was almost certainly false), but added that he was not without influence and would see what he could do.
The harassment instantly stopped. From then on, Minns made sure that he always owed money to the most prominent people in town. He was never bothered again.
robc
Sep 12 2023 at 10:24am
On the other hand, I think he had lots of interactions with moral busybodies.
In one of his essays, he refused to take a position on gambling, as it was a temptation he never faced as it interested him none at all. As a layman, he didnt feel he could discuss any vices he hadnt been at least tempted to.
Following on that, I would guess he had at least some interaction with robber barons (and a lot with moral busybodies).
nobody.really
Sep 12 2023 at 11:08am
Here’s a fellow, you say, who used to come before us as a moral and religious writer, and now, if you please, he’s written a whole chapter describing his old [all-male boarding] school as a very furnace of impure loves without one word on the heinousness of the sin. But there are two reasons. One you shall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said, the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle.
(“This means, then, that all the other vices you have so largely written about…” Well, yes, it does, and more’s the pity; but it’s nothing to our purpose at the moment.)
* * *
The Wyvernians [students at this elite boarding school] seem to me in retrospect to have been the least spontaneous, in that sense the least boyish, society I have ever known. It would perhaps not be too much to say that in some boys’ lives everything was calculated to the great end of advancement. For this games were played; for this clothes, friends, amusements, and vices were chosen.
And that is why I cannot give pederasty anything like a first place among the evils of the Coll. There is much hypocrisy on this theme. People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable than this. But why? Because those of us who do not share the vice feel for it a certain nausea, as we do, say, for necrophily? I think that of very little relevance to moral judgment. Because it produces permanent perversion? But there is very little evidence that it does. The Bloods would have preferred girls to boys if they could have come by them; when, at a later age, girls were obtainable, they probably took them. Is it then on Christian grounds? But how many of those who fulminate on the matter are in fact Christians? And what Christian, in a society as worldly and cruel as that of Wyvern, would pick out the carnal sins for special reprobation? Cruelty is surely more evil than lust and the World at least as dangerous as the Flesh. The real reason for all the pother is, in my opinion, neither Christian nor ethical. We attack this vice not because it is the worst but because it is, by adult standards, the most disreputable and unmentionable, and happens also to be a crime in English law. The world may lead you only to Hell; but sodomy may lead you to jail and create a scandal, and lose you your job. The World, to do it justice, seldom does that.
If those of us who have known a school like Wyvern dared to speak the truth, we should have to say that pederasty, however great an evil in itself, was, in that time and place, the only foothold or cranny left for certain good things. It was the only counterpoise to the social struggle; the one oasis (though green only with weeds and moist only with fetid water) in the burning desert of competitive ambition. In his unnatural love affairs, and perhaps only there, the Blood went a little out of himself, forgot for a few hours that he was One of the Most Important People There Are. It softens the picture. A perversion was the only chink left through which something spontaneous and uncalculating could creep in. Plato was right after all. Eros, turned upside down, blackened, distorted, and filthy, still bore the traces of his divinity.
C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)
robc
Sep 12 2023 at 3:32pm
Yes, it was there too.
But I was referring to a different piece.
The gambling thing came up multiple times, I think Suprised By Joy was the only time he mentioned homosexuality, that I can remember.
Monte
Sep 12 2023 at 12:36pm
Yes! The unassailable logic of Hayek: “No single person knows more than a tiny fraction of all that there is to know about how to make the ink and paper . . . No single person—indeed, not even a committee of geniuses—could possible know more than a tiny fraction of all the details that must be known to produce the ink and paper.”
The personification of a well-meaning tyrannical government, we can imagine, would be someone like Mrs. Grundy, or worse yet, Walter J. Freeman II, who performed ice-pick transorbital lobotomies on over 4000 patients, many of whom either died due to cerebral hemorrhage or were reduced to a vegetative state. All were left worse off for the experience.
Go fly a kite, indeed.
nobody.really
Sep 12 2023 at 1:15pm
1: My understanding is that NOT all were left worse off. At least one went on to get a PhD in mathematics and teach at a university.
2: More to the point, I am unaware of any lobotomies performed in the US without first securing consent. Perhaps tyrannical government has gotten involved to regulate/ban the procedure–although, again, I don’t know of any such regulation/ban. As far as I know, the story of lobotomies is the story of the private sector in all its glory.
Monte
Sep 12 2023 at 4:31pm
Interesting. Can you provide a link or reference to this person? Even if true, I doubt the PhD was earned due to the wiggling of an ice pick. By most accounts, Freeman’s patients were left worse off and, with rare exception, were stabilized from depressed or suicidal state.
Consent secured from mentally disturbed patients or a family member? But I think my analogy holds. As a private citizen, I’d rather do for myself what I think is best for me than rely on a benevolent dictator, just as I’d rather deal suffer the consequences of depression than have Dr. Freeman relieve me of it by inserting an common household icepick through the thin bone of my eye socket to scramble my brain.
I’m unaware of any such ban myself, although the practice was pretty much abandoned by the late 80s. In either case, I’m not sure I’d hold it up as a prime example of the private sector in all its glory.
Monte
Sep 13 2023 at 12:57am
Rather, “on rare occasions” stabilized from a depressed or suicidal state.”
Henri Hein
Sep 12 2023 at 1:43pm
I like that Espenshade is open-minded enough to realize she did not observe what she expected to observe, and honest enough to report it.
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