Self-Evident Truths Get Smacked Down By Reality

Children’s Games by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

This past Sunday evening, a sharp and mysterious pain presented itself on my face. On Monday, I saw my regular dentist. He got me an immediate appointment with a fellow dentist, a Park Avenue endodontist (a root canal specialist). When you have undiagnosed facial pain, needing a root canal is a hope, not a fear. Assuming that paying for it is not an issue.

In the waiting room, I sat across from a beefy, sandy-haired man in shorts and a tee-shirt. We nodded to each other. He had a kind face and was about my age. After a few minutes he went up to the reception desk.

He spoke softly but I was near the desk so I could hear what he was saying. He was going to put off the procedure he had come for because he couldn’t figure out how to pay for it. Plus, he owed money for a past procedure.

The man left the office, his shoulders sagging. My immediate thought was “why do I deserve to be seen and treated and this man does not?” There was nothing I could do. I leaned back into the chair. Then, inside my head, I shouted at myself, F**k this!

I stood up and went to the desk. I told the two receptionists that I wanted to pay for the man’s procedure, whatever it cost. I wanted to remain anonymous to him. I asked them to let the dentist know.

In the end, the dentist discovered I had a badly infected tooth. An hour later, he performed a root canal that quelled my pain. Before I left the office, the office manager told me that the dentist was going to work something out with the man. My offer to pay was appreciated but unnecessary.

Who is deserving

The day after my root canal, I read an excellent essay on the concept of “deserving.” The essay, written by Christine Tan, an expert on Chinese philosophy, was linked by fellow Substack writer Jeffrey Streeter who writes superbly about many things. ¹

Tan’s essay begins by pointing out how natural it is for us to want to see people get what they deserve. We want people to be rewarded for their good behavior and punished for their bad behavior. Both vice and virtue should have consequences. Otherwise, there’s no sense of moral justice in the world. Instead, there’s chaos.

Tan brings in Confucius from 2,500-years ago to give us a solution, a prescription for a morally just society. Leaders of a society should be those who attain the highest degree of “worthiness (xian).” Tan defines xian as “compassion, righteous judgment, and moral restraint.”

Confucius held that xian should dictate a society’s status hierarchy. The more xian one has attained, the greater one’s leadership role ought to be.

What follows is the greater the leadership role, the greater the responsibility. With greater responsibility comes greater power. Greater power requires greater material resources. A night watchman of a gate needs only himself, but an emperor in his magnificent palace might need thousands in his retinue to support his work.

A key assumption of the Confucian solution is that all people are capable of attaining xian, so there’s a fairness to rewarding those who excel at it. And who can argue against “compassion, righteous judgment, and moral restraint” as being the proper measures for awarding status, responsibility, and resources?

Enter Zhuangzi the contrarian

Tan tells us that Zhuangzi, a Daoist philosopher writing about 100 years after Confucius, thought the Confucius solution was fatally wrong in a few major respects. ²

Pursuing xian is actually antithetical to human flourishing, because you’re pursuing titles and credentials, things that are outside yourself. Tan writes:

“This leads one to treat their own life as raw material for that abstract identity. One’s material body becomes an instrument for something immaterial.”

Zhuangzi tells the story of being summoned to a palace and offered a prestigious position. He points to an exquisite bowl made from a turtle’s shell and asks whether the turtle would rather be alive or have his body used for an ornament. Point made; Zhuangzi turns the position down.

Zhuangzi thought that Confucius had the order of operation reversed. The titles, the power, and the resources, come first. The attainment of xian was then used to justify the spoils. And who, after all, was the arbiter of xian except the powerful and the rich? What say would the night watchman have about who had xian compared to the word of the emperor?

Tan writes:

“Power, therefore, often does not reflect virtue, but instead has the ability to produce the appearance of virtue. This is how hierarchy manufactures its own moral narrative. Those who rule come to be called righteous.”

Zhuangzi’s most powerful point, however, is to demolish the Confucian point about equality of opportunity to attain xian. Zhuangzi thought this was a complete fantasy. One’s circumstances have a great deal to do in determining the course of one’s life. What we now call meritocracy is both a myth and a scam. Tan writes:

“[Meritocracy] offers a narrative in which suffering is temporary, sacrifice is rational, and the future will vindicate the present.”

If you’re a “loser” in the game of meritocracy, it becomes difficult to admit that you’ve sacrificed for nothing or admit that you were just not good enough. And if you’re a “winner” in this game of meritocratic striving, how irresistible it can be to believe that you are the primary author of your own success.

Zhuangzi argues that these are false beliefs used by the people in power to justify themselves and to effectively imprison everyone else in a Confucian competition that most people are bound to lose. Because there can only be one emperor but thousands of night watchmen.

Finally, to underscore that no one is self-made, Zhuangzi uses the example of a mythical god who glides gracefully in the air. Even this deity, however, depends on something else to appear effortless, in this case, the wind.

Detail from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus showing Zephyr, the deity of the west wind

From deserving to acceptance

I have wrestled with my own good fortune and whether I “deserved” it. To bolster my claim of deserving, I could point to many decisions I’ve made that have led to the life I have now. But that’s a trap. ³

Because I cannot ignore Tan’s list of relative advantages:

“upbringing, pedagogy, institutional pathways, emotional and material support, health, luck and the ordinary labour of others,”

all of which played a significant role in shaping my life. There’s room for my personal agency but personal agency takes place within the context of all the advantages above. The winds have been at my back.

The entire concept of deserving is flawed. A while ago I disabused myself of the myth that I was the chief agent responsible for my successes in life. So if the question of whether I deserve my life is irrelevant, then so is the concept of guilt. How can I be guilty about advantages over which I had little to no control?

This is not a cop-out or an amoral concept. Instead, I can use the agency I do have to love and help others––family, friends, and strangers––because it makes me feel good in the moment. My actions do not have to serve as the raw material for some future credential or recognition.

Accepting inequality

We know that contingencies play a huge role in our life, whether it’s where we’re born, who our parents are, who, or if, we marry, or whether we happen to pick a career that suits our skills and fills our bank account.

Once you accept the contingencies that underlie inequality, then the moral infrastructure of meritocracy is demolished. We are not the prime agents of our success or failure. We are all fated to be unequal in many ways.

But some aspects of inequality are choices made by society. They are not fate.

The inequality of my access to dentistry compared to that man in the waiting room is one such choice. It’s a barbaric one. His pain and my pain are the same. A wealthy society like ours should not be organized so something as universal as pain is treated unequally.

A truth, a proposition, or a myth

We know that no society has ever made everyone equal or given everyone equal opportunity. But on July 4^th, we read aloud the Declaration of Independence and the famous “self-evident” truth that all [people] are created equal. In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln called it a proposition, rather than a truth. And in his I Have a Dream speech, MLK called it a promissory note that America had defaulted on.

Pretending that we are all created equal leads the privileged to narcissism and the non-privileged to despair. It divides us into winners and losers, as if we all start off life at the exact same starting line, like runners in a race.

Christine Tan writes in her essay that if we can rid ourselves of the myth of meritocracy:

“We would be rid of the cruel fantasy that a person’s place in the world is a reliable valuation of their worth as a human being.”

It is morally correct that all people ought to be endowed with certain rights by virtue of simply being alive. One such inalienable right should be healthcare, including dentistry.

Ideally, no one should have to wait for or defer a root canal. One day, I hope, we’ll have true universal healthcare. But we have a long way to go.⁴

1. The essay, highly recommended, is No one is self-made by Christine Abigail L Tan, linked by Jeffrey Streeter in his recent essay The Grievous Age.

Jeffrey described the article as:

“a fascinating critique of the Confucian notion of meritocracy via the writings of Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi (c. 369–286 BCE). If the subject seems a bit remote, Tan is not slow to draw conclusions that are related to the modern world. But to be honest, she doesn’t have to try very hard to do so. For example, she quotes Zhuangzi as having teased this moral out of one of his tales:

‘A small thief gets arrested; a great thief becomes a ruler’.”

2. Here is Britannica’s entry about Zhuangzi. I had not heard of him before but I’d read this famous parable attributed to him:

“Once I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamed that I was a butterfly and was happy as a butterfly. I was conscious that I was quite pleased with myself, but I did not know that I was Zhou. Suddenly I awoke, and there I was, visibly Zhou. I do not know whether it was Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that it was Zhou. Between Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction. This is called the transformation of things.”

3. I wrote this post two years ago.

4. I know public school administrators who get their dentistry overseas because the quality/cost combination is so much more favorable than in the United States. And regular dentistry is out of reach for many Americans.

Here is a 2024 analysis from the Kaiser Foundation about dental coverage and usage for people enrolled in Medicaid. As the Trump cuts to Medicaid are rolled out next year, the situation will get worse.

From the report:

“The share of adults [with Medicaid] using any dental services ranges from under 5% in Alabama and Tennessee to over 30% in Montana, Minnesota, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. This means that, even in the state with the highest rate, almost two-thirds of adults are not receiving any dental care within the year.”