Rights And Obligations

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Rights and obligations. (Chapter from the book "The Cure for Poverty"

Since a few pages earlier I led you (or you, my beloved reader) to such a strange conclusion that money is equivalent to obligations, then understanding what happens to people with their obligations, we will understand what happens to their money.

What is a commitment?

Obligation is the restriction of any freedom. Such a restriction can be voluntary or coercive. If a person has any obligations, he must perform certain actions, or vice versa - refuse to perform them.

For example, when a red light is on, pedestrians and drivers must stop. These are the rules!

Something opposite to the obligation is usually called right … Right implies freedom of choice of action. In the same situation with a traffic light, some drivers have the right to pass the intersection at a red light. They can exercise their right or not, but they have the freedom of such a choice.

Right implies the possibility of choice in how a person disposes of his actions, objects, time, money, freedom, etc.

If we take a closer look at the world around us, we will notice that there is a certain confusion with rights and obligations. People are acting strangely. Some continuously owe something to someone: family, country, humanity, etc. Others, on the contrary, constantly insist that someone owes them something: relatives, government, aliens, etc.

Moreover, if you ask one and the other category, when those transactions took place, which these people are talking about, when they borrowed and how much, or when they gave and under what circumstances, then they will look at you as if you were sick.

Is there any hope of sorting it all out? Let's first try to sort everyone out.

Once upon a time, the American psychotherapist Eric Berne noticed that people enter into relationships, having initially some kind of prejudice towards themselves and a potential communication partner. He called this bias a predicate position.

Bern singled out the following positions: I am good - you are good, I am good - you are bad, I am bad - you are good, and I am bad - you are bad. This is written about in almost any book on transactional analysis.

It is clear that communication between people will develop very differently depending on the position. For example, a woman who believes that all men are bad is unlikely to create a happy marriage. A person who is sure that all rich people are villains will most likely live in poverty. You can imagine or see any position in others and assume the possible consequences. As transactional analysts suggest, such attitudes are nurtured from childhood. A mother raising a child with a very big grudge against men is likely to instill in him the same position.

If we recall the history of our society, then for several decades the position "rich - bad" was supported ideologically and legislatively.

However, the evaluation matrix proposed by Berne is not well suited for the purposes of this book. It remains unclear who owes whom. Good to bad or vice versa.

I dare to say that people enter into relationships with each other with initial obligations.

People have obligations according to their ideas about the world. For example, in our culture, men are supposed to let women through when they meet at the door, and younger than older, eh … I’m not confusing anything?

An acquaintance of mine worked in the United States and said that he insulted his work colleague all the time by trying to open doors for her. The real scandal happened when he tried to help her lift a heavy oxygen tank. He had no right to try to help her without her asking. He had to stay out of the way. In America, the rules are different!

Family traditions, social traditions, professional, national traditions, personal traditions carry a huge amount of such initial debts. I am not talking now about the expediency and common sense of these traditions. I just mark these debts as fact. Children owe their parents, parents to children, husbands to wives, wives to husbands, doctors to patients, patients to doctors, Russian Jews, Russian Jews, etc. Remember the old joke: “Hello! Rabinovich is speaking. Is it true that the Jews sold Russia? If so, when and where can I go to get my share?"

I would call such initial ideas about debt existential or life positions (EP). The existential position determines the rights and freedoms that a person allows himself and the world around him to have.

In my opinion, the following existential positions can be distinguished. An attitude of equality or cooperation. At the same time, by the word "world" I mean everything that surrounds a person: other people, nature, the planet, aliens, if you like. Haven't you met people who are offended by the weather, for example,

I understand, my patient reader, that with this matrix I encroach on the most sacred thing - on debts. But if you look closely, you can find that for a Martian who does not know any rules, only the first cell reflects reality. You can talk as much as you like about how society should be organized, how people should behave, what the weather should be like, or where the rivers should flow, but the world around us continues to exercise all its rights with amazing persistence. As someone well said, no one is obliged to follow the law of gravity, but if you ignore it, you can get hurt. The earth has the right to attract people to itself, people have the right to fly. The plane is one example of cooperation.

Of course, any of us, if he is not some kind of enlightened being, periodically happens in each of these four positions.