Necessities,
Desires and Guarantied Level
Alexander Liss
When something we want should be called a
necessity? A person could survive for a long time without food; even in the
simple case of food, the answer is not obvious.
In a civilized society, there is a tendency
to provide necessities to ones, who can't afford them; hence, this question
goes far beyond from being simply linguistic question.
Essentially,
"necessity" could be defined only in context of a particular society.
As society develops, necessity changes. Necessity is
what members of society have to have, for this particular society to develop in
a healthy way. In turn, the healthy development of a society is defined by what
we perceive as a healthy development of humanity as a whole.
Some necessities of modern society are obvious: food, closing, shelter, and physical safety.
Others
are not so obvious:
·
work
or business as a source of income (only a few tend lend or have cattle),
·
some
transportation (work and services are rarely at walking distance),
·
some
level of health care (one has to be in touch with other people and put oneself
into some risky situation to be able to work)
·
basic services as sewer, water, etc. (large
concentration of population forces people to live together).
It
is important to differentiate "necessity" from an abstract
politicized notion of "what a person has to have". For example, only
an ability to have treatment in the case of accidents related to commuting to
work or shopping for groceries or in the case of illness caused by airborne
infection or other infection, which spreads because of use of public
transportation or because of living in apartment buildings, could qualify as
necessity.
This
is recognized by society in some degree. Cities have tax subsidized public
transportation; there are various built-in subsidies for health insurance
provided by businesses to their employees, and so on.
One
social tendency is to provide a bureaucratic structure, which assures that
members of society have necessities. The problem of this approach is inherent
to bureaucratic systems. Bureaucratic systems spend perpetually increasing
share of resources on self-preservation and self-maintenance and decreasing
share of available resources on providing services. In addition, they are slow
to adapt to changing circumstances. In this case, they tend to support what
stopped to be a necessity and do not support new necessities.
The
other social tendency is to satisfy Desires "in excess" that the
majority of members of society have its Necessities satisfied automatically.
With the rest of society, some ad hoc mechanisms are set to deal with their
necessities. The problem with this approach is twofold. First, the majority of
society has a perpetual anxiety that it is realistically possible to get into a
situation, where one's necessities are not met. Second, there is a disenfranchised "bottom"
of society, which necessities either are not met or met via a mechanism alien
to the society.
As
experience shows, societies relying on bureaucratic system quickly arrive to
the point, where population can't be fed; these societies could become a danger
to themselves and their neighbors.
Societies
relying on excess of production often have severe problems during turmoil
(natural disaster, war, market crash, etc.).
Any
society guaranties satisfaction of Necessities only partially. The Guarantied
Level of satisfaction depends on society.
As
experience shows, societies with low Guarantied Level of satisfaction are
unstable.
Raising
the Guarantied Level of satisfaction requires a mature rich society and
perpetual update of mechanisms, which provide this guarantee uniformly to all
members of society.
Finding
of an appropriate Guarantied Level of satisfaction and mechanisms providing
such guarantee is a perpetual challenge, which has to be met by a political
system.