I recently watched "The Martian", Ridley Scott's space flick about a Mars exploration team that accidentally abandons an astronaut on the surface of Mars. Early in the movie, the mission commander is forced to decide whether to risk the crew to continue searching for the missing member, who is likely dead, or to save her crew and abandon the search, and that dilemma got me to thinking about the Three Musketeers and their motto -- All for One and One for All! That motto is a pithy, stirring description of rock solid solidarity. But in the world outside of novels, unbreakable bonds run into trouble in the thorny world of tradeoffs and Hobson's choices, not with respect to the strength of the bond, but with respect to how best to honor it.
Consider a military unit. It has a purpose that is worth more than the individual lives of its members, which is to protect the much greater numbers of civilians in the population. Volunteer armies are thus composed of citizens who have chosen to risk their lives in order to protect the rest of society, the risk of course being that they may get killed in the process. Presumably, those volunteering to join have done the math and have determined that the threat the country faces is worth the potential loss of their lives. And, there are times when that sacrifice is necessary. The beach must be stormed although it won't happen without some soldiers dying. The hill must be taken even though it costs some lives. The fort must be defended even if some defenders are killed protecting the citizens inside. The few must give their lives for the many and they do so willingly.
And yet, many military units have traditions of never leaving men behind, and they are very proud of these traditions. The willingness to risk your life in order to save the life of your fellow soldier is an essential part of the strong bonds between fellow group members that together form the esprit de corps, the "group spirit" that is the heart of good military units. But, if life is spilled to try and save a soldier who already volunteered to give up their life to achieve the greater goal of the military unit, don't these rescue casualties come at the expense of achieving the greater goal of the military unit? If I volunteered to stay and spray lead across a crossroads until the enemy killed me in order to buy time for the rest of my fellow soldiers to escape and keep fighting, and I did this because I believed in what we were fighting for, then how angry would I be if, as the light faded from my vision, I saw all those fellow soldiers that I sacrificed for mount a vain and fruitless charge into a hail of enemy bullets in order to save me? Wouldn't I really then be dying for nothing?
Now, there are many directions that the discussion could go from this point. We could talk about how armies formed from conscripts may not be as dedicated to the societal reason for war as a volunteer army, and thus may be more prone to an insular, praetorian identity where the unit is more dedicated to themselves and survival rather than a larger purpose, and thus don't really care if their protection of each other comes at the expense of bigger objectives. We could talk about a sweet spot between the greater fighting effectiveness of a unit with strong esprit de corps and the small sacrifice the unit makes to rescue members, such that rescue attempts, although they do bleed material and lives, may in the end be a productive investment of these resources with regards to achieving the greater goals of the army. And, we could talk about how solidarity imposed from the top down, ordering someone to rescue someone else, may actually harm group solidarity rather than helping it like bottom up volunteers do.
The design of the Steem community is to set initial parameters and then let the community bring about balance on its own, and along those lines, the question I would like to discuss about this topic is, at what level is this All for One or One for All decision best made? Where on the spectrum between decisions made by generals and decisions made by privates does an army find the sweet spot with regards to balance between the needs of the individual versus the needs of the group?
Make no mistake -- this topic is not about the military. It is about society, because society has limited resources facing unlimited demands about how to use those resources. The answer to this question has ramifications about how social safety nets are best designed, be they implemented through taxes from the generals at the top or voluntarily offered by the privates at the bottom through charity. It has implications for health care for our elderly, as the Boomers cease to give and start to take, a demographic shift that will be like a tsunami crashing onto the much smaller subsequent generations. It has implications for care for children with moderate autism, who deserve a chance at mainstreaming but whose necessary expenses of individual aides and separate tutoring may eventually become prohibitive, especially if those children continue to require permanent social help as adults, and especially if autism rates are climbing.
From my perspective, we are all in this together and my eye is on the future. I believe in pay it forward with respect to my children (which of course is at complete odds with our current societal practice of loading debt onto future generations without regard for their ability to pay it back.) I see no difference between asking a young man to take a bullet for his country and asking an old man to decline expensive medical care for his country. We are faced with an impenetrable thicket of demands for societal help from individuals on all sides and steadily declining resources with which to provide that help, and this trend will continue irreversibly until societal resources collapse -- all empires eventually collapse from parasitic anemia. This does not mean that the society will collapse, but the society will have to change in an environment of extreme duress, a process that usually involves somewhat independent communities arising from within, and how those independent communities answer this question will in part determine their success.
So the question is, where in the spectrum between top down collectivism versus bottom up individualism is the sweet spot for society to choose whether to have the many sacrifice for the one versus the one sacrifice for the many?
