Mencius: How Much Do We Owe Our Fellow Citizen?

Mencius, public domain image.
C/o the Wiki Commons

I've been working my way through the David Hinton translation of Mencius for quite a while because I think that anyone who is interested in Daoism should also have a bit of an understanding of Confucianism too. Indeed, the temple that introduced me to the Way not only made the Classic of Filial Piety one of its core texts, it allowed Confucians (the "priests of Ru") to perform rituals in the building. (According to my teacher, the Temple belonged to the geographic community, not any one particular religion. Indeed, he once suggested that it be named "the People's Temple". Unfortunately, the association of this name with the infamous Jones Town cult meant that the board of directors opposed this suggestion.)

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Consider this passage:

"These days, if someone in your house gets in a fight, it's fine to rush out and rescue them with your hair hanging loose and your cap untied. But if it's someone from your village that's fighting, then it's wrong. In fact, it's perfectly fine if you just bolt your door and ignore it."     

Mencius, David Hinton Trans, Chapt VIII, Section 29

Of course, Mencius doesn't really think "it's perfectly fine to just bolt your door and ignore it". Indeed, earlier on in this section he talks about Yu and Hou Chi. "Yu the Great" was a legendary ruler of China who introduced the people to hydraulic engineering as a means of controlling flooding. And Hou Chi (or "Hou Ji") was the hero who introduced Northern China to growing millet---China's first staple crop. Mencius says of these men that whenever Yu heard of a person drowning he felt that it was his fault. Hou Ji felt the same way whenever he heard of someone starving. Mencius is contrasting Yu and Hou Ji to the "ordinary man" of his day---who simply doesn't want to get involved unless he has "skin in the game".

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This raises an interesting question. How should we react towards the sufferings of complete strangers? Here's another take on the issue, from the excellent movie "The Third Man".

Harry Lime (the character played by Orson Welles) says something to the effect of: "Look at those little people on the street. To us they look like little more than ants. Who cares if they live or die---especially if you can make a lot of money in the process? (Tax-free, no less!)" He then goes on to make a dubious claim about culture, namely that the Swiss have had 500 years of peace, democracy, and, prosperity and have produced little more than the cuckoo clock; whereas Italy at the time of Borgias was a cesspool  of violent intrigue yet it produced the great art of the Renaissance.

I wrote "dubious" because actually the cuckoo clock is a German invention and at the time of Borgias the Swiss had the most powerful army in Europe. This meant that their soldiers were in high demand, which is why the Pope to this day is protected by Swiss mercenaries. This is an important point to consider, because Lime is expressing a very persuasive bit of sophistry in an attempt to convince his friend to work for him instead of the police. And what he does is pretty awful---he steals antibiotics, dilutes them, and, sells adulterated product to desperate people with sick children. Indeed, Lime's friend decides to hand him over to the police after they show him a ward full of children who suffered permanent brain damage as a result of treatment with Lime's shoddy medicine. (Think "meningitis".)

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So who should we believe? Mencius or Lime? When a person dies should we feel responsible like Yu the Great did? Or should we simply see them as "ants" that are probably better off dead anyway?

The first thing to remember is that this isn't a logical argument. Confucianism isn't about rational analysis according to the canons of reason. Instead, it's about introspection of our emotions. The traditional Confucian argument is that people are innately concerned about the well-being of others. And the archetypal image that they present in support of this idea is the child crawling towards the open well. The argument is that almost everyone would prevent the child from falling in. But this raises the question posed by Harry Lime---what if you really don't care? What if money really is more important to you than the well-being of others. This isn't a hypothetical question, as illustrated by the crazy behaviour of businesses around the world. Consider, if you will, the actions of milk producers in China who put melamine in their product because it will "spoof" the protein testing system that defines quality of milk.

If you go back to Harry Lime's monologue in the above YouTube clip, around the 1:30 mark he starts to introduce a general theory about people's motivation.  

"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about "the people" and "the proletariat"---I talk about "the suckers" and "the mugs". It's the same thing. They have their "five year plans" and so have I."

Think carefully about this argument. It is an attempt by Lime to move from the relatively easily-defended position of saying "it isn't true that all people care about others" to the totally indefensible position of "it is actually true that nobody cares about others".  This point of view is totally ridiculous. Obviously a great many people care about what happens to other people, which is why there was outrage around the world when people found out companies were putting melamine in milk used in baby formula.

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Is it possible that Lime really believes that "everyone does it"? I think that he just might. Consider the following line of argument. The world we live in is, bye-and-large, an abstraction. Instead, the people we interact with is very limited:  our immediate family, who we work with, and a small number of friends. And some of us know a lot fewer people than others. I have a very wide circle of friends and acquaintances from all my years in politics. Other people I meet, however, seem to only know co-workers and family members. Others have wider circles of friendship---but they are limited to a particular subculture, such as a church or other religious organization. Increasingly, I suspect that a significant fraction of the population have self-selected themselves into a subculture of like-minded people who only really interact with people who also see things much the same way.

What if someone is surrounded by criminals like Harry Lime? Could he eventually honestly say "Nobody thinks in terms of human beings---"? He's not right, but he's making an understandable statistical error---he's generalizing about a much larger population based upon an analysis of a non-randomly selected sample: the criminal underworld. If you live in that milieu and never socialize with anyone outside of it, you can start to really believe some pretty strange things.

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There's another side to this. People aren't simple. They can hold several opinions at the same time---sometimes ones which directly contradict each other. This is what we mean when we say someone is "conflicted" or "on the horns of a dilemma". A person can be like Harry Lime and honestly think that "everyone does it" and at the same time have a nagging feeling that he is still doing something wrong. Indeed, why does Lime think that he has to justify himself to his friend at all? Why not just shoot him and throw the body out the car of the Ferris wheel?

In cases like these, the arguments that they put forward can be attempts to talk themselves into believing what they say that they believe. Years ago I watched a totally ridiculous movie called "Frankenhooker". It was about a modern-day Victor Frankenstein who's girlfriend was killed and her body destroyed from the neck down. This modern-day Prometheus decided to bring her back to life by killing prostitutes and building her the "perfect body" by stitching together their best parts. In one of many over-the-top scenes the protagonist started having moral qualms so he performed an self-inflicted lobotomy on himself with a electric drill to ream the conscience out of his brain. Do people create crazy arguments in a similar attempt to get those pesky second-thoughts out of the equation so you can continue to make tax-free money off poisoning children? Is Harry Lime using ideas like an electric drill to remove a residual conscience? 

Indeed, could it be that in some minimal way a part of Harry is hoping that his friend will talk him out of his amoral point of view? Confucians put a lot of emphasis on the importance of remonstration in the face of evil. Indeed, a previous post I did on Mencius (Mencius: Filial Piety and the Rise of Neo-Fascism) mentioned the responsibility of scholars to disagree with people---family members or government leaders---who have talked themselves into taking immoral actions. How much of a moral responsibility lies on Harry's friend to try and talk Harry into ending his criminal activities?

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Bev Oda, spendthrift Tory
Public domain image c/o Wiki Commons

I'm making a big deal about this issue because I often come across people who justify immoral behaviour in politics on the basis of "everyone does it". In fact, I think that this idea gets a lot of people into real trouble. For example, it seems to be something of a "thing" for politicians to go absolutely wild with their expense accounts. For example, consider Bev Oda---a Conservative Cabinet minister in the Stephen Harper government. She got into hot water after people found out she spent thousands and thousands on limo rides, fancy hotels, and---most famously---$16 for a single glass of orange juice. (I could cite several more recent examples from the Trump government in the US.)

I suspect that these people come into office under the assumption that government is a total cesspool and that "everyone" spends money like water. (That seems to motivate a great many conservative politicians.) With this assumption in mind, it's easy to move towards the idea that "everyone does it---so why not me?" Another possible explanation could be that some of these people start to mix with the very wealthy as part of their time in office and begin to lose track of the fact that the vast majority of people have to watch their money and spending $16 for one glass of OJ is just not acceptable.

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Having trouble with an expense account is one thing. But this attitude can also encompass far worse things. If you believe that the opposition are a bunch of amoral traitors, then that would encourage someone to believe that "the ends justify the means". This is part of the reason why Donald Trump has been so damaging to American political culture. He encourages people to believe all sort of outrageous things, such as:

• Barack Obama wasn't born in the USA and was therefore unqualified to be President
• Hillary Clinton is guilty of criminal behaviour and should be put in prison
• prestigious news organizations like the New York Times and Washington Post routinely print "fake news"
• that immigrants are mostly thieves and rapists who come from "shit hole countries" to take advantage of "entitlement" programs 

This sort of political discourse is dangerous in the extreme because it encourages a fraction of the population to believe that they live in extremely dangerous times where a true patriot should seriously consider taking extreme measures to ensure the survival of his society. Just to consider how much American political culture has changed in the last ten years, consider this clip by the Republican candidate for president in 2008. 

You can see that the poisonous partisanship that was overtaking American society had already affected people that were attending McCain's rally. (Don't pay too much attention to the idiotic questions---listen to the crowd's reaction when the Senator answered them.) I think that what you heard was McCain's honest, personal feelings when confronted by the awful ideas that ordinary voters who supported the Republicans were believing. (McCain deserves some blame for the current mess too. He is a coward who routinely "caved" in order to get along with his idiotic supporters. Don't forget that he inflicted Sarah Palin on the body politic.) 

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The big thing that I want readers to get from this post is process related. I'm trying to show you the sort of discursive analysis that Confucians use to make sense of the world around them. Mencius draws from the history of China to compare the way Yu the Great thought of his fellow citizens and how ordinary folks did in his time. In the same way, I've been drawing from today's news as well as films to illustrate important issues. It isn't a logical argument in the sense of using set theory or truth functional calculus. Instead, it is an attempt to develop more and more articulate understandings of our own personal emotions and what we think is right and wrong about the world around us. It isn't a form of meditation as we commonly understand the term, but it does have the effect of calming the mind and developing a deeper understanding. I think of it as "Confucian contemplation". 

Among other things, our culture is suffering from a "crisis of clarity". Hordes of highly-paid "spin-masters" are paid huge sums of money to confuse the general public into supporting very dubious policies. We have fake news, foreign propaganda influencing elections, media that play people's emotions like organists, and, politicians building successful careers on not much more than bullshit and outrage. In a situation like this it is vitally important for citizens to learn how to dispassionately contemplate the world we inhabit and carefully parse out what they do and do not agree with. Moreover, we also need these people to go forth into the public sphere and remonstrate with both the people they meet and the community's leadership in order to push back against the avalanche of fear and anger that they have unleashed.  

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Alas, if you thought you would avoid the begging bowl it's not going to happen. I put a lot of effort into these posts and I wouldn't be helping the cause of "creatives" all over the Web if I didn't remind people that if you like this sort of thing you should consider supporting it. I understand that some people don't have a lot of money, and the great thing about using the Patreon model is that it will never take away content and hide it away from people who cannot support it. But if you can help out, consider even as little as $1 a month or per post through Patreon. Tips are appreciated too---if you especially like one particular post or you feel particularly generous. Also, consider buying a book. Finally, share the post through social media. Word-of-mouth is the big advantage that good writing has over expensive advertising, and it is essential for building support. 

Volunteerism, or, Yes You Should Do Work for Free

I recently got into an unfortunate exchange on FaceBook that resulted in my "unfriending" an acquaintance that I met through politics. He'd posted an image from a Batman movie that I found particularly annoying and used the opportunity to work through why it bugged me. He responded with a call to "lighten up", which I refused to do.

The Offending Image

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There are two things about this image that I find really annoying. First of all, I do not like Heath Ledger's portrayal of "the Joker" in the movie "The Dark Knight". I didn't like the movie at all. It was a reactionary fantasy about a world where the biggest problems that society faces are anarchic street criminals that a "politically-correct" and hopelessly corrupt government finds itself incapable of opposing. The problem with this portrayal is that it is ridiculous. The fundamental problem that society faces aren't bank robbers, it's the owners of the banks. And the worst criminals aren't criminally-insane people who dress-up in pancake make-up and create spectacular explosions, but rather psychopathic "snakes in suits" who are able to worm their way into organizations and twist them to their own ends. The way this movie (and the entire Batman franchise) plays on this reactionary trope came home to me after Barack Obama was elected president of the US. Almost immediately, my hometown was blanketed with the posters that portrayed him as the Joker.

Obama as Joker

Frankly, I found these posters offensive and racist. What was really annoying is that my town isn't even in the USA, it's in Canada. And Obama wouldn't even be considered much of a progressive by most Canadian political parties---let alone a "socialist". But the way right and wrong are expressed in the Batman world appeals to reactionaries, so it makes total sense that someone would use the Heath Ledger Joker portrayal to riff on the "Kenyan Usurper" motif.

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Even worse, from my point of view, is the message that "The Offending Image" attempts to portray. I sometimes hear from "creative types" (artists, musicians, writers) that they are being horribly exploited in that they are sometimes asked to "work for free" and that this is a vile, awful idea. The argument is that no one expects anyone else to do stuff for free, so why the heck should they? How could I possibly disagree with such an idea?

My response is that the idea that no one should work for free is supporting the idea that every human interaction should be transactional in nature. Even if no money changes hands, people need to reciprocate in every interaction. This does tremendous violence to the way human society operates. Did you pay your mother for raising you? Did the people who led your scout troupe get paid? How many human institutions would collapse if everyone who worked for them expected to be paid? No more volunteer fire departments. No more food bank. No more soup kitchens. No more community orchestras. No more political parties. No more activist groups. Linux wouldn't exist. You get the picture.

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Paul Mason

I recently heard a talk on the CBC show "Ideas" by Paul Mason about his book PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. He argued, among other things, that a new society is coming down the pipes, one where non-transactional (my word) relationships will become more and more important. His argument is that modern technology is increasingly dominated by processes that are almost impossible to monetize. That is to say, the information economy is based on ideas instead of things, and by definition ideas are better given away for free instead of sold.

Science and technology only flourish in a world where information flows freely through journals and conferences. If you try to monetize it through patent protection, you stifle innovation and encourage the creation of "junk science". Open source software is inherently better because it benefits from the insight and creativity of everyone in the world who knows enough to participate rather than a very small pool of engineers who are being paid to work on it. Music and literature that exist as digital files instead of vinyl records or paper books can be copied and shipped all over the world for a fraction of the previous costs. The big issue for creatives is marketing, not distribution---which means the biggest problem for most artists isn't having your work copied and shared for free, it's seeing your work being ignored.

Reactionary and neo-liberal politics is increasingly all about putting this genie back into the bottle. For example, I understand that one of the biggest elements of the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement involves patent protection. As well, increasingly professions have become arbitrarily exclusionary in order to allow "rent-seeking" by those members of society that are lucky enough to have the right credentials. That is part of the reason why, for example, the legal system has become so insanely complex---lawyers don't want it to be to simple enough for an intelligent person to be able to navigate it without paying a lot of money to experts. Fighting against these attempts to limit the

Pirate Party Logo

free flow of ideas and creative content has fueled the rise of groups such as the Pirate Parties of Europe.

Mason argues that instead of trying to fight against the new technologies that make it harder and harder to reduce relationships between people into monetary transactions, government should be working to make it easier. This isn't as startling as it sounds, as what we call the "free market" is actually a government creation that was put into place through centuries of government intervention. To cite one example, the legal artifact known as the "limited liability corporation" was specifically created by European legal systems to foster the creation of large trading companies. This was because the sums of money required to build fleets of ships to travel overseas were far too large---and the enterprise too risky---for even the wealthiest individuals to attempt. So the legal fiction of the "corporation" was created which holds the liability instead of the individual shareholders who are not personally obliged to "make good" on the company's debts.

One suggestion that Mason makes is that the post-capitalist society could be fostered by the creation of a guaranteed annual income. His concern is that unless the "safety net" becomes better we will see a stratification in society between the people who have paid employment and those who do not. Moreover, the ones that do have employment will become more and more militant about keeping it. The result will be a lot of "rent seeking" in society as people fight tooth and nail against efficiencies that would shrink the work force. And without a good safety net to protect against catastrophic failure, a lot of "ideas workers" won't take the personal financial risks necessary to devote their personal time into creating "the next great idea" on their home computer. Trapeze artists always develop new moves while using a safety net. Why shouldn't inventors and entrepeneurs have one too?

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One of the important points that Mason emphasized in his talk is that we are the first society in the world that has solved the problem of scarcity. That is to say, there are no absolute reasons why people should find themselves living in poverty. Any scarcity that people currently find themselves in has been manufactured by human society instead of being intrinsic to the nature of existence. Artificial scarcity can come about for various reasons. One of which is simply because society refuses to redistribute wealth. Another is to create a society where people's wants have been artificially enhanced through things like advertising to the point where people feel that they are being deprived if they lack any number of unnecessary consumer goods. Another one is to design societies in ways that make it very difficult to live without wasting resources---such as housing people in suburban sprawl so people have to use personal automobiles instead of public transit. One last way is to refuse to control population growth so that any surplus production gets eaten up by creating a surplus of consumers.

If we are going to survive past the climate change "bottle neck" however, this creation of artificial scarcity has to end. Instead, we need to create social mechanisms to enhance the ability of people to live within the current abundance instead of feeling the need to always get "more". The creation of an economy based upon the free exchange of ideas is pretty important to that. And, I believe that this is an aesthetic that is at the core of the Daoist ideal. In Journey to the West there is an exchange between two characters where they talk about living a simple life. One of them has a poem about living the simple life of a fisherman who supports his family with the bounty of the lakes and streams. He says when times are bad and there are no fish, they can always eat the leaves of the Tree of Heaven. (I wouldn't recommend this as this could very well be an example of a bad translation confusing one type of tree with another.) The point being that the man of Dao lives in a state of abundance all the time. Partially, this is because he lives a frugal life. And partially, this is because his willingness to learn from nature (a kung fu) gives him the ability to adapt to and see resources that are hidden to the majority of people.

These two old immortals in Journey to the West are living a life of simple abundance because they have made the transition from the old transactional economy based on "things" to the gift economy based on "ideas". Mason's point is that our entire society needs to make this transition now if we are going to survive as a civilization. That's why I fundamentally reject the idea that all creative people need to be paid for everything they do. It is a view of existence that is fundamentally out of harmony with the Dao.

Competition is a Very Bad Idea

I had some conversations recently that reminded me about some very bad ideas that infect many people's minds and create chaos in our civilization. I thought I'd explain one to my readers.

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Competition

A fellow I know has been asking me a lot about a Canadian institution known as "French Immersion". Canada is an officially bilingual country. This means that the government has mandated that all over the nation everyone is entitled to being served in both French and English. A practical upshot of this is that lots and lots of good-paying government jobs require or strongly recommend fluency in both languages. This ranges from high ranked civil servants down to the woman who sells you stamps at the post office.

This has had a lot of results in our society. One of which was the beautiful mother and young daughter I heard talking away in French when I came back from the Farmer's Market on Saturday. This is a good thing. Another result was the fear from middle class English speakers that their children would never be able to "get ahead" if they weren't fluent in both languages. Since most parts of Canada outside of Quebec are totally English speaking, this created pressure for school boards to create public schools where children from English speaking homes are taught only in French. The result is supposed to be children who are fluently bilingual when they graduate.

This has created several big problems.

First of all, it is really expensive to create a second public school system that parallels the existing one. Second, it costs a lot of money to bus those students who's parents want their children to attend a French immersion school across town. Third, it breaks up communities as children who live next door to each other are often strangers because they do not go to the same school. And fourth, it is the most talented children with the most engaged and supportive parents who go to these French immersion schools. This is a problem because it leaves English public school teachers with a higher percentage of demanding students to look after and the schools lose the students who are often good role models for  the ones that struggle.

In essence, French immersion schools have become elite private schools that are part of the public system.

Space is limited in these public/private schools. This means that the competition for placement in a French immersion school has become intense. Parents sit in cars for days waiting for the doors to open so they can register in the "first come, first served" system. In other districts where people can register by phone, people create "parties" where parents co-operate in order to get to the first. (They all dial until one gets through then the rest pile on and register their children through that connection.) School boards are trying to deal with the issue through creating a lottery. But this doesn't satisfy parents who still want their children to get into the school but fail to win a place.

The fundamental flaw fueling this idiotic situation is the issue of competition for a limited number of positions.

To understand this idea we have to do some thinking from game theory. Let's consider a competition by a population that is larger than the limited number of slots that are open. For example, 100 couples want to get their child into one of 50 slots in a school. If one couple decides to "game the system" by taking extra-ordinary measures---such as sitting out all night in a car so they can be first in line when the doors open---they will end up increasing their chances of getting their child into the program from 50% to 100%. Unfortunately, other parents will see that this strategy works, which means that they will start camping out, which will mean that people have to wait longer and longer periods in order to make sure that they are in line. (According to one article I read, in some areas parents are already waiting for three days ahead of time.)  This is an inevitable outcome in a "first-come-first-serve" system where people are selfishly competing with each other. That's why more and more school boards are using a lottery to assign positions.

But the system gaming for placement is just a minor subset of competitive gaming. The entire concept of a French immersion school system is an attempt to "game" the labour market. Middle class parents who cannot afford to send their children to a real private school are trying to use the French immersion program to give their kids a "leg up" over the others when it comes to finding good jobs when they graduate. Again, the problem with this is that there are only so many jobs where being bilingual will give their children an advantage. So getting your child involved in the immersion program is no guarantee that they will actually get one of those jobs. But one thing we can be sure of, however, is that the more competitive we make the educational system, the more miserable we will make the children who are in it.

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One of the big flaws in competition is that people almost never consider the opportunity costs  that flow from it. These can be both personal and communal.

In the case of communal opportunity costs, parents are not considering several things. First, in "gaming" the application system, they are creating a system that makes it harder and harder to go through the mechanics of actually enrolling their child. Secondly, by making such a fetish out of French immersion, they are damaging local English public schools, disrupting the community, and creating excessive and unnecessary costs for all the schools. Finally, by dramatically expanding the pool of bilingual citizens they are making competition for a limited number of government jobs just that more intense.

In terms of personal opportunity costs. The pressure that parents are putting on children to "excel" in their education so they can be more competitive with regard to the other members of their generational cohort lowers the quality of life for everyone. In other nations where society is more competitive than ours, this competition for good schools and good jobs has gotten to a place that most North Americans would find appalling. For example, my ex once explained to me that in India middle class children are usually expected not only to work hard at school, but they are also tutored in their "spare" time in order to get a "leg up" (actually, to just keep up) with their class mates. In addition, they are usually expected to do things like seriously practice a musical instrument (in order to discipline the mind.)

This same intense competition for scarce "entry tickets" to good middle-class jobs also exists in other countries such as China and Japan. Indeed one fairly successful book on this subject is "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother". I haven't read it myself, but my understanding that it describes what the author, Amy Chua, calls "traditional Chinese parenting".

Amy Chua: Tiger Mom

There are several problems with this system.

First of all, it puts enormous stress on children and I suspect this damages many of them. Secondly, it is based on the assumption that it is possible to teach a child how to do "everything" or "the important things". I suspect that it is possible to teach or train a child to do many different things, but some of the most important come from unplanned or unpredictable experiences. And those things are by definition unteachable. The child needs some time to spend in an unstructured environment in order to find his or herself. I'd be interested in seeing long term studies that would show how many people who came through this sort of up bringing suffered from some sort of psychological problems in later life. I'd also be interested in seeing how many of them actually became trail-blazers in their fields as opposed to "middle-men" and technicians. I would suspect that the sort of rigorous imposed training in routine and practice costs in terms of creativity and courage.

On a macro level, this intensive pressure on individuals to compete within a system does nothing at all to change it. And that is probably the biggest opportunity cost. Society needs to do something about wealth inequality and the power dynamic that fuels it. Putting huge pressure on our children to become better and better at competing for the small number of jobs needed to support a super wealthy elite does nothing to change the system into something better. For the individual, this strategy might seem to be "more realistic", but for the society as a whole it is suicidal.

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When I was young I was taken to a special event at our local agricultural co-op. The guest speaker was a famous Canadian fiddler by the name of Al Cherny. He told a little story about a man who died and when he came before St. Peter he was told that he had been accepted into Heaven. The fellow was a bit of skeptic, so he asked if he'd be able to check out both Heaven and Hell before he made up his mind about where he wanted to go. The saint said that this was OK, so the fellow went off to Hell to check it out.

Being a practical sort, the man went off to the mess hall to see what the food was like in Hell. He said that the devil chefs were serving soup that day and it looked and smelled pretty good. When the denizens came trooping in the door they were all given spoons. But they were strange in that they had impossibly long handles. This meant that when one of the citizens of Hell tried to eat the soup, it all fell out of the spoon and all they got were tiny dribbles of the soup. As you might imagine, this was pretty frustrating.

The fellow thought this was not terribly good, so he then decided that he wanted to see how things fared in Heaven. Again, he went to the mess hall. In Heaven the angels were serving soup too. And surprisingly, when the people of Heaven came in to eat they were given exactly the same types of spoons as the people in Hell! But when they ate they took the long spoons and fed the people sitting across them them at the table. Everyone had lots to eat and all proclaimed the soup was delish.

The point of the story was obvious. If we want to create a Heaven on Earth, we are going to have to help one another instead of competing!