When we all do better

Paul Wellstone, former US Senator from Minnesota who died in a suspicious plane crash three years ago, just two weeks before the 2002 election (at which time he was way ahead in the polls, his numbers having gone up shortly after he voted against giving the Prez the authority to invade Iraq, the only Senator up for re-election who did so), had a saying: “When we all do better, we all do better.” Maybe he didn’t coin it, but he said it a lot.

The phrase has a tautological aspect that may bother some logicians. It seems so obvious! Duh!

Yet as I think about it, this concept reflects a view of human nature that departs rather radically from the one that’s dominant today and has been in Western culture for a few thousand years at least.

“When we all do better, we all do better” speaks of a connection between our own well-being and others’ well-being -- implies that the one is dependent on the other. The old Wobbly saying embodies the same idea from the negative side: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” We can’t really do better, be happy and healthy, feel contented, if others are not doing well, are miserable and sick, don’t have enough. Some even say we suffer PTSD in varying levels when we live in a system that tolerates and engenders misery.

The dominant view holds, in stark contrast, that the well-being of some is dependent on the emmiseration of others -- the “zero-sum” approach. If I am happy, someone else has to be unhappy. If I have enough, someone else has to be deprived. And if I want to be one of the happy, healthy ones, I better see to it, because if I don’t, somebody else will be happy and healthy at my expense.

Cultural myths and beliefs justify the inequities, beliefs that some people are more deserving than others, that people who are poor and miserable have only themselves to blame, that some are simply fated to “do better.” Hierarchies of power seem “natural” when seen in this context. Sharing is not mutual aid, but condescending charity. Fairness is not a basic moral requirement, but must be earned, and those on top get to decide who’s earned it and who hasn’t.

“When we all do better, we all do better” can be seen as embodying a similar kind of condescension that urges the "haves" to take care of the "have-nots," while accepting as a given that “the poor you will always have with you.” But Wellstone’s phrase can also be understood in another way, as advocating that when the common good is our collective priority -- when we all (as a society) do better -- we support conditions in which everyone’s needs are met -- we all (as individuals) do better.

At bottom, it’s about power, and the worldview of zero-sum dictates that if I have it, you don’t, and if I give any of mine up, you’ll eventually have more than I do and then you’ll do the same to me as I have been doing to you. But, though there’s plenty of evidence to back this up throughout human history and never more than right now, I don’t think that’s the kind of creature we really are. I think we are designed to care about each other because our happiness and well-being are connected with others’ happiness and well-being, and to share power because that’s the only way to make sure we all do better.

And as long as we have power hierarchies and zero-sum assumptions about our well-being, there will always be many living in misery among us, and even those of us who are doing better will not have true well-being, because an injury to one is an injury to all, whether we know it or not. We are all connected, for good or ill. (And why not make it for good?)