Competing Goods and Inhumanity

Speaking about humanities and inhumanities necessarily leads to a discussion of needs and a hierarchy of needs.

One way of organizing needs, at least in a political sense what I tend to call a Pentagon of Ends.

What are these five ends?

Freedom, Wealth Creation, Social Protection, State Survival, and Group Identity/Actualization.

Does the pursuit of these ends by governments and/or individuals lead to a harmonious, balanced, and comprehensive result or series of results?
Unfortunately, while all of these ends are worthy in themselves desirable in combination, the pursuit of them individually leads to a kind of competition.

Let’s examine each of these “ends” in turn, and use the United States and the most prosperous countries of the EU as testing grounds for how these ends play out.
Freedom in these countries exists in a reasonably comprehensive manner; so does the ability to create wealth through starting businesses, with protection of efforts to create and grow wealth promised by the rule of law.

Both of the above ends speak to absolute goods.

Meanwhile, social protection, the existence of unemployment insurance, health insurance, and similar measures, while sharply different in the United States from the countries of the EU in certain respects, provides recognition of issues of relative means and inequality.

State survival and group Identity/actualization are non-issues in the wealth states of the first world. No one worries about these governments collapsing or about the safety of certain ethnic or religious minorities, despite discrimination, because of the rule of law and overall stability.

But consider new countries in the shadow of the old empires that these new countries used to belong to. Georgia, a former Republic in the Soviet Union (and Stalin’s native land) has experienced an uneasy coexistence with its behemoth neighbor since its independence in the early 1990’s.

Georgia’s territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, with large Russian populations pose puzzles for Georgia and Russia alike, indicative of the problems in the Balkans that resulted in “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990’s. Should any region with a majority of a particular ethnic group secede from the government it belongs to? Should a government endangered by such a possible succession forcibly keep such a region tethered to the larger entity, often at the expense of the ethnic group that has majority status in a particular province, but minority status in the country as a whole?

In such situations, the last two ends, the survival of the state, in this case, Georgia, and the actualization of a particular ethnic group, in this case, Russians, compete. Both Georgian and Russian authorities accuse each other of aggression and “ethnic cleaning”. If Russia overspreads Georgia and takes it over, it will obviously liberate ethnic Russians inside Georgia, but at the expense of the Georgian government and ethnic Georgians. If Georgia somehow fights the Russians off and forcibly reasserts itself over territories with large Russian populations, Georgia’s government will survive, but at the expense of ethnic Russian safety.

Inhumanity has become the result of this clash and the competition for governmental and ethnic survival.

Stay tuned.