Life as we know it is beset on all sides by the lack of life. We struggle against death for every quectosecond. Feeling the project of life as a long march in enemy territory, the place of those we must carry on the march is not to lead, but to be carried where the able may lead. Those who can see must lead the blind, for the blind make horrible scouts, though their hearing makes for great alarms.
Live long enough, and almost every one becomes dead weight. Those who die fast while young and able might escape this fate.
Many of us hope that someone will drag us to safety when we go down. Others hope we will be left behind when we become a burden.
An increasing number believe that getting crippled and needing to be carried as an adult is a primary prerequisite for power.
This works if you want your able to spend most of their time waiting for your disabled to fall off a cliff, competing to rescue them at just the last moment, and listening patiently to the rescued about how the rescuers did it wrong.
Time that could be spent taking new territory.
When we are more injured or weaker, we are to be led, not followed.
The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard is a Substrate for Expectations of Equal Reward
You Can Promise Anything in the World of Ideal
Injured People Have Less Energy for Decisions
It is Easier for a Cripple to be Great
Making the Great Smaller
Caring for Everyone is Caring for No One
Bringing the Dead Back to No Man Left Behind
Who is in your chamber?
The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard is a Substrate for Expectations of Equal Reward
A unique characteristic of Western civilization after Christianity is a tendency for the weak and less able to be placed ahead.
The first time I experienced this on a road was in Fremantle, Australia.
Instead of being wary of a car hitting you while you were walking…cars just stopped for pedestrians. What a concept! This ran counter to my childhood in Malaysia, where pedestrians gave way to motorcycles, motorcycles gave way to cars, and cars gave way to lorries- all from the informed threat of being hit.
I was in love with this norm. It lined up with Matthew 20, which describes the Kingdom of Heaven as a vineyard owner hiring laborers. The owner promises a denarius for the labor. Some laborers arrive in the morning, and work all day in the hot sun. Some laborers arrive just before the work is done. The owner pays them all the same, so those who worked longer say it’s unfair. The owner says, “It’s my money, isn’t it? I can do what I want with it. You envy my generosity.” Then he finishes it off with:
“The last shall be the first, and the first, last.”
Christianity, then, is built on this idea of equal pay for unequal work. Sure, American strains enter into all sorts of convolutions to distance themselves from what sounds a lot like Communism. Canny ones will note that there’s an owner here, and it’s about the owner’s generosity. Though the medieval Church did have to put down multiple heretical movements centered on equality and free love.
You can see how the one line becomes an easy slogan. The first shall be the last. The last shall be the first. The wolf will dwell with the lamb. And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
From that lineage, you might see how you get “shrimp welfare”(especially with Jainist syncretisms), deaf accessibility demands taking down MIT and UC Berkeley videos, and a congressman diagnosed with bipolar disorder plus an OxyContin addiction driving Federal costs up by at least a couple hundred million dollars a year.
You Can Promise Anything in the World of Ideal
Most of the time, when people are comparing a solution to a painful problem that affects society at large, they are comparing the solution to something in the ideal world, rather than what is currently being used as a solution.
This practice has trickled down to personal relationships, as well, which serves to expand atomization further. If your friend, brother, parent, or girlfriend doesn’t match up to the ideal that was promised in a marketing campaign, just cut them out. Keep doing it until you find the ‘right’ person, the person promised in the ideal.
In 2012, I backed a Kickstarter campaign for Star Citizen. Imagine a game that is a galaxy full of spaceships, some trading, some dogfighting, and so on, and every ship is piloted by a player. Online crowdfunding was just getting started, and it was exciting to get caught up in possibility. I put $85 in. More than a billion dollars later, they tell us it will arrive in 2027 or 2028. A year before that, I’d declined to buy Bitcoin because I’d thought it was a Russian scam.
I have a friend who still buys Star Citizen ships. He’s put almost $3k into it. He was very excited about every new release, and would talk for hours about his ships.
In the US Army, there is a tradition of an NCO saying something to the effect of, “just one more mile”, or “last one” with a calisthenics rep. Folks, it was never the last mile, and there were always more reps. Though eventually, every run and physical training exercise did end.
What would you say to keep people going if you knew it would never end?
The neat thing about life after death is that you can promise anything you want. It took awhile for any culture to really make use of that, mostly because it’s hard to argue with experience. Yet once we got it going, well, you can get houris as a martyr, or become gods with angels subject to you.
Is it true? We will never know, but maybe preaching will get you better at selling timeshares.
It is from the identification of the Platonic Good manifest through the God of Abraham that we get many similar expectations today.
Expectations which promise that the weak are more worthy than the strong, and so the sick should command the healthy.
Injured People Have Less Energy for Decisions
Decisions cost energy. Injuries, disease, and self-involvement compete for that energy.
Think about doing your taxes. Now think about doing your taxes with a dislocated ankle. How about a strained back?
One way to lose weight quickly is to get third-degree burns. Injury raises your resting metabolism, sometimes by up to three times the normal level. Surgeries, fractures, and large bruises all do the same.
This isn’t the case for concussions, and you wouldn’t expect it with psychiatric disorders.
Yet, psychiatric disorders are related to metabolic dysfunction.
It is Easier for a Cripple to be Great
It is harder to achieve excellence when you have some disability. A comparative disadvantage. So when you excel, you know you had to do that much better.
Nick Lavery was on his second deployment to Afghanistan, when someone inside the wire opened fire. Lavery took rounds to his legs in an attempt to cover a comrade. He stopped the bleeding. Made it to Bagram, only to get the wrong blood type in a transfusion. Lost his leg.
Lavery could’ve left the Army and received a generous stipend for the rest of his life. Instead, he convinced his unit to let him back in. Did what it took to prove he was still capable.
We hear stories like that and we’re inspired. If he can do it, what’s stopping me?
I felt the same way watching Tracy Telligman (who only has one lung) fight in the UFC. Nick Newell, who was born one-armed. Or reading about Kyle Maynard, a quadriplegic, climbing Kilimanjaro.
I saw it when I saw my father, who got Parkinson’s at an early age, free climb. Later, when I was informed that he somehow got his hands on a scooter and escaped into a forested area, despite barely being able to walk, I couldn’t help but be inspired, despite how annoyed and scared the rest of my family was.
Confined as a vegetable in a nursing home, I found that he could still stand up. Not always- he’s rarely lucid. Most days he can barely move his eyelids. However, one day, he stood up.
The staff said it was not allowed.
Making the Great Smaller
In all these examples, they did not take their disabilities lying down. They fought them every one-inch wiggle of the way. None of them made the disability an identity, or dwelled on their situation as a victim.
We cheapen their achievements when we suggest that the able must follow the disabled only because they are disabled.
We take away the means for their greatness, and their ability to actually lead.
We are freed to do more than anyone can ever expect, when we can acknowledge the hands we are dealt.
Caring for Everyone is Caring for No One
An emergency triage forces tradeoffs. Let’s say you have the following patients at a mass casualty event:
- Alice, whose leg was cut off below her left knee
- Bob, whose body has been completely separated below the waist, but he’s still breathing and looking around
- Charlie, who is walking around without a hand
- Daniel, who appears blinded and is shouting for help
- Eric, who’s on a wheelchair and wheezing
Who do you help first?
Something like “assist those most vulnerable” would suggest Bob. Something like “we must be fair” might suggest Eric, as it’s possible Eric has been disabled for a longer time than everyone else. A folk response might be “go where there’s the most blood”, which would be Bob again. Another common response might be “go to whoever is loudest”, which would lead us to helping Daniel first.
The method emergency medical personnel use to decide this today is downstream of Dominique Jean Larrey, a surgeon in Napoleon’s Army.
It asks, what outcome can you actually move? Of what you can do, which action would save the most human life?
In the US Army, we had IDME.
- Immediate: This person will die IF they are not treated, but may live with an intervention.
- Delayed: This person may die tomorrow, or lose a limb, eyesight, or other functionality, but waiting an hour isn’t going to kill them.
- Minimal: They’re walking around.
- Black: The modal result strongly suggests this person will die, even with intervention.
With that, we would slap a tourniquet on Alice first. A leg amputation will usually lose more blood than a hand amputation, so that’s why Alice goes before Charlie. Charlie gets the second intervention. We get Eric talking while we’re looking at Daniel. If Eric is talking he’s fine for now. Then we cycle through Alice and Charlie again, stabilizing the interventions further. This is assuming you’re helping them alone.
If there are more people, you would be using the same prioritization, but acting as a control room instead, using other hands and feet. Let’s say we discover that Daniel was blinded by blood from a forehead cut. As soon as we get him seeing again, tag, you’re going to direct him to help you out.
After all this, we can look at Bob. Maybe get Daniel to pray with Bob, or give him company, sing with him, take any last words, etc. The focus is still on getting Alice and Charlie stabilized.
All the while, we’re getting everyone’s respirations per minute, heart rate, blood pressure, and so on, to see if anyone is deteriorating at a different pace. Let’s say Eric has gone from 20 respirations a minute to 8. Suddenly, this changes your focus. Check to see how Eric is getting air in and out.
Take that scenario. Imagine we had said that due to the privilege of our ableness, we should instead listen to the directions of Eric or Charlie. Sure, they might have useful information- but they’re not the ones with the clearest means to make any decision about how to allocate energy.
What if Eric tells you to help Bob, who is in the worst situation? You help Bob. Alice loses precious seconds. She dies within eight minutes. Twenty minutes later, despite going through a slew of interventions, Bob dies. And now Charlie passes out.
Death is fair, in that it comes for us all eventually.
Bringing the Dead Back to No Man Left Behind
A norm of the Hellenes was in bringing their dead back, to put them to rest properly. Perhaps you remember the scene in The Iliad, where Priam begs Achilles for the corpse of his son, Hector. You can read lots of examples in Thucydides.
In an earlier season of life, I wore dog tags.
It is said the Spartans had sticks with their names on them around their wrists, and we know that Roman Legionnaires had signaculum, though they likely didn’t identify individuals.
Nation-states found a need to bury their dead at scale in the rehearsals for World War I that were the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War.
From this, we get today’s identification tag.
The Korean War sharpened things, with expectations for soldiers who were captured. Vietnam exacerbated it further, with jungle disappearances and media coverage.
Now it was no longer just the dead, but the living that had to be found. Given the MACV-SOG operators left to rot in Laos, a reminder was needed.
Army Rangers added this to their creed:
I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country.
The rest of us got the simpler, “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” Which makes sense, because I embarrass a lot of people.
A key takeaway here is comrade.
Your chamber mate. Your roommate.
Someone you perspired with, would shed blood for, who would have shed blood for you.
Honor your dead. Bring back the people you lived with.
Who is in your chamber?
In 1981, Peter Singer released The Expanding Circle.
It says that as time goes on, civilization progresses to include a bigger and bigger circle of care, including all animals. From this vein, we get a notion: as we become more civilized, we will care about every individual life on Earth as much as we care for ourselves. This necessarily leaves out what is alien to recent minds, that ancient ability to care deeply about what you kill.
Gwern points out where it’s actually narrowed: ancestors, gods, fetuses, and the particular type of care for animals that one has when one is more dependent on them. So he suggests calling the circle shifting instead of expanding.
As with any change, we can ask: what did this shift effect? And is that the effect we want?
This ongoing shift, as far as I can make it out, helped cause the breakdown of the tribe, the clan, the domus, the family, and the voluntary association. Strengthening a centralized state, diluting the will of those that make it up. It brought us the biggest group, and so, it brought us stability.
In thinking we can & must help everyone, we find it difficult to actually help anyone.
Consider cabin loss of pressure on an airplane. You care about everyone, and the least able, so you might want to put the oxygen mask on someone’s pug puppy first. Or perhaps the pressure loss is happening on a different plane altogether, and you are moved to help them. What can you actually do in that position?
When you give money to an institution to redistribute your energy for you, will the person on the other side come for you when you die? Will the institution? Perhaps if you’re one of the biggest donors.
We lead the living, where we can. We carry our dead.
I laid the blame for this mass paralysis on Matthew 20. As a heathen, it amuses me to pin Bible verses.
So I will tell you that Galatians 6:4-5 suggests that you should focus on your own work and bear your own load. Romans 12:4-6 says that Christians must do different things to make use of their unique gifts:
For just as we have many parts in one body and all [a]the body’s parts do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually parts of one another. However, since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to use them properly: if prophecy, in proportion to one’s faith.
And 1 Timothy 5:8 says that you’re worse than an infidel for not providing for your family. You will not provide as well for your family when you put the least in the world ahead of your family.
A year ago, I was talking to my mother’s cousin, who’s closer in age to me. She was mulling over how to approach the fact that her father has dementia. He was a very capable man, used to being in charge all his life. But now it was time.
In one sense, it’s been easier for me. As an 11 year old, I felt my parents were conned when they didn’t listen to me. I got to witness a decline, and when my father began stumbling, there was no hiding it. I changed his diapers before I changed my son’s diapers.
It’s different when dementia or Alzheimer’s hits over a few years. It’s different when your otherwise able friend is upset. It’s different when, in a moment, someone is just too tired to make a sound decision.
But it’s on us to recognize it, when it’s time for us to step down, and when it’s time to step up.
If no one is coming to save our own but us, who else will lead us to victory?
Go, Go, Go!
Stick together team!
