Suffering is optional

For most of history, suffering was unavoidable.

Daily life for most people was constant, grueling toil. Acquiring the mere necessities of life—plowing and planting, spinning and weaving, mining metal and forging it into tools—demanded backbreaking labor. Childbirth was a potentially deadly ordeal, and infants and children died in huge numbers. Rulers were cruel, power-hungry and unaccountable to their subjects. War, disease and famine were ever-present threats.

Why was life full of pain and hardship? Every culture has wrestled with this philosophical problem. Most of them invented religions to account for it. They conjured one imaginative theology after another, whether it was squabbling gods, flawed demiurges, divine curses as punishment for sin, or the attacks of malevolent spirits and demons.

Even though these stories weren't literally true, they served an important emotional purpose. When life was hard and painful, they served to justify it. They convinced people that there was an order and a design behind the seeming chaos, and therefore gave them a reason to carry on. You might say they were propaganda in the interests of civilization.

But the old myths have outlived their usefulness. Life doesn't have to be painful anymore.

Most of the evils that afflicted humans in the past have been defeated by technology. Farming still takes hard labor, but mechanization and the Green Revolution have increased agricultural productivity so that now a small minority of farm workers can feed everyone. Assembly lines and robotics churn out consumer goods faster with each passing year. Vaccines, antibiotics and sanitation have eradicated some diseases and brought many others to heel. Maternal and infant mortality have plummeted across the world.

All these advances sum up to one bright-line conclusion: Suffering is optional.

A collective choice

People still suffer, of course, but it's not because of cosmic necessity. It's because we allow it to persist.

That doesn't mean each individual person could be free of suffering, if only they made the right choices. That's the selfish creed of extreme individualism, proclaimed by apostles of capitalism who believe we should demand nothing of others and ask nothing of others. These people say that everyone should do what they did. But, invariably, they're blind to the fact that those choices were only open to them because they came from a background of privilege.

It's a safe bet that the people who preach this laissez-faire gospel never had to skip meals or forego medicine they couldn't afford; never had to assume a crushing debt burden to get an education; never had to drop out of the workforce because of disability, child care, or elder care; never had to work a job that poisons them or breaks their bodies down.

Rather, suffering is optional in the sense that we could collectively, through democratic consensus, organize society to eliminate it. The root causes of the problem are too great for one person to address alone, but they're not beyond the overall capacity of civilization to solve.

Unfortunately, those with the powerful to engineer such a realignment of priorities are rarely inclined to do so. As then Jordanian foreign minister Marwan Muasher put it just prior to the Arab Spring, "There is nothing wrong, everything is under control." Calling this the "Muasher doctrine," Noam Chomsky latched on to what he saw as an encapsulation of the real incentives of the powerful: The maintenance of control is all that really matters. The rest, including suffering, is background noise. Why expend resources over noise?

What if

But suppose we managed to overcome that inertia. What would the future look like if we made the end of suffering our goal?

The first thing is to recognize that poverty is a treatable illness. We can end it any time we choose.

A recent Scioto Analysis put the cost of ending homelessness in the US at $11 billion per year. That's 1.3% of the annual defense budget, or if you prefer, five stealth bombers. A choice is made, a direct reflection of the priority of control ahead of everything else.

The wealthier nations could voluntarily release patents on critical innovation. They could share the technology to bring all countries up to the same level of productivity.

With that infrastructure in place, we could institute basic income programs across the globe. These programs wouldn't provide for everyone's every need, but would put a floor beneath people so they couldn't fall into destitution. On top of this foundation, we could declare that health care, housing and education are human rights, to be granted to everyone who want and need them, not allocated only to those who can pay.

As the other side of these guarantees, society should ensure that everyone who needs a job can have one, through community programs similar to the New Deal's Works Progress Administration. These programs would give everyone meaningful work and purpose, work that contributes to the productive flow which sustains society.

We can imagine a world where every town replaces landscaping and lawns with farms and gardens that grow food. These community gardens could be in open land if available, or in vertical farms, rooftops and greenhouses if space is at a premium. They'd be managed and run by the people who live there, growing food where it's consumed, selling it at cost or even giving away to people who contribute their labor in a cooperative arrangement.

We could institute programs to rebuild or retrofit buildings to waste less energy, as well as installing rooftop solar panels, windmills and geothermal heat pumps. Many communities could become completely energy-independent and self-sufficient this way, and for those that couldn't, the goal would be to come as close as possible.

For people whose talents don't run to farming or construction, there are the human-touch professions—nursing, teaching, child care, and other work that's always needed and that can't be automated. Again, these jobs can be woven into the basket of benefits that's guaranteed to everyone.

So much of our suffering comes from the fact that society is structured as a series of zero-sum interactions. The caprice of markets makes some people unjustifiably wealthy while others are left destitute; some people have all the work they can handle and more, while others are stranded with no opportunities.

A wiser approach such as I've described here would alchemically combine these two separate problems into one unified solution. By guaranteeing that everyone who needs services can get them, and that everyone who needs a job can have one, these two sides of demand and supply would work in tandem, creating a virtuous cycle where each one reinforces the other.

One of the larger obstacles to this better world is that those old stories, invented to give people the spirit to persevere despite suffering, now serve as positive defenses of suffering. Millions of people believe that life should be hard and painful, because their founding myths were written at a time when it was. Rather than accept that their beliefs are outdated, they want to hold the world in stasis to bend reality to their view of it.

Also, it would overstate the case to say that all suffering and unpleasantness can be avoided. There are still diseases we can't cure and disasters we can't prevent. There will always be people who die in tragic accidents; who strive for their goals but fail to achieve them; who can't find the love and friendship they desire.

These small tragedies will always be with us, however close to perfection we might come. However, the major causes of suffering can absolutely be eliminated. Just as no one has to be poor, no one has to live a life of enforced misery.

This better world I've sketched isn't going to arrive any time soon. Some days, it seems further off than ever. But the first step—when we see people suffering, deprived, or in need—is to recognize that their sorry state is artificial. No law of nature mandates it, only human choices. We can make different choices any time we wish.