The question implicit in the last post was: what does your luck in being born in a particular place at a particular time entitle you to? It was a rather arbitrary happening, don't you think? I think the answer has to be, not anything in general, but maybe there is some particular advantage to be derived from it.
Everybody is good at something, whether we want to admit it or not. My wife has one of the greenest thumbs I've ever seen, while I am any living plant's Grim Reaper. I have a fairly well developed ability to read quickly and a talent to remember a lot of what I read as well. I have a friend who's a math whiz (even higher mathematics) and I know a couple of well-above-average sports folks (golf, soccer, tennis), and some outstanding musicians, too, some of whom could have gone professional but decided against it for whatever reasons.
The question that has been plaguing me since thinking about the accident of birth and what it might entitle us to has now infiltrated this next layer of life. Maybe being born in a particular place at a particular time doesn't entitle me to much, but don't I have to play the game by whatever rules are in place there? Shouldn't I be rewarded in some way for my talents?
Green thumbs give you an edge in the realm of horticulture, being able to remember a lot of stuff helps you win at "Trivial Pursuit" (but after a while nobody wants to play with you anymore). When my math friend came of age, nobody really cared (recently he could have made big bucks in the banking industry, but he was too old by then), and perhaps not the sports fanatics I know, but some of the musicians certainly deserved (in my estimation) to turn pro, but most of them never got "discovered". In other words, and I think my math whiz friend exemplifies it best, even if you've got the right stuff, if it's the wrong time, it just doesn't matter.
Don't you think that this is all a terrible waste of talent? I do. We certainly can't fault any of these folks for having talent no one wanted. That was again, more or less the luck of the draw. We don't have any more influence over when we were born than where. There are right times and not-so-right times for different talents.
What bothers me about all of this is that our current society heaps more-than-generous rewards on certain individuals who, by the very nature of how nature works, didn't get to where they were solely on the basis of their own hard work or inherent talents or anything of the sort. They had, for whatever reasons, luck, and a lot of it at that. On the one extreme, the person who wins the lottery ends up being rich, but does s/he deserve to be so? Most of us think "no" because they didn't "earn" it. But, if it is the case that a good number of those who have reaped such great benefits have done so on the basis of luck, why do we think that they deserve what they have?
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