The truth of this line struck me while I was jogging yesterday. We sacrifice the results of our efforts all the time for the sake of living in a society, and for the prosperity of that society. We do not achieve our dreams despite our utmost efforts -- either because of poor luck, or because we did not do well enough relative to others, who may or may not have been advantaged from the start.
We can literally spend an entire lifetime focused on one goal, and still fail. The chances are pretty slim, but not impossible. And the chances of failing when you spend a LOT of time--but not a lifetime--working for one thing are not inconsequential.
But it is more than that. We also lose compassion in evaluating the claims of others to their dreams. For we must sacrifice them, too, in our criticism, for the sake of living in a society, and for that society to prosper. From the moment that we are born, we are indoctrinated with the notion of virtues. We are told that people who have these virtues are better than others, and are more likely to succeed--which is true. But we are also taught to value these virtues in and of themselves. We all come to believe, in a deeply engrained way, that we are better people if we have these cvirtues. We ought to aspire to achieve these virtues even if we do not achieve our goals.
Furthermore, the odds are much higher for people in our society who start off advantaged. They are much more able to succeed in the values system we've established for ourselves. But, for lack of a system that produces better results, we must simply accept their dominance--in part because it does not entirely preclude the rise of others. (There is never any moment at which certain goals will be entirely closed off to you, so long as you haven't yet hit old age or incapacitation. Almost all long-term goals can be achieved through alternate, non-socially-sanctioned ones.) But nonetheless, we must constantly turn a blind eye to this fact in order to motivate everyone, including ourselves. For we would become too weepy if we failed to value individual achievement and dwelled too much on getting everyone to start in the same spot. The people I know who have the best motivation are also those who do not dwell on their starting place, or on the distance they must travel. They simply do not care how far they must travel relative to others--simply that they care about the goals and can feasibly travel the distance.
There is one potential way out of this difficulty: we all gain happiness from living vicariously through others, or from living in such an accomplished society. This argument seems plausible. For I certainly get a lot of utility from watching videos of spacewalks on the international space station, or from watching people run in the Olympics. Perhaps we simply value living in a society with such an achievements-studded history that we are willing to sacrifice the risk of personal failure, or of shallow compassion and mercy.
I think this is the same general phenomenon that happens in criminal law, when we refuse to give second chances to criminals because our society is trying to motivate the conduct of others, even when some individuals may feel compassion toward criminals who seem to have made a single mistake that will ruin their entire life. Can we really believe that someone "deserves" a lifetime of pain for killing one? Of course, the conduct we are trying to motivate here is pretty basic, just refraining from harming others.
So when Brett Dennen says There Ain't No Reason, I reply that there is a reason. But it requries a sacrifice on the part of the losers. So, depending on your position of what constitutes morality, there ain't no reason for those of us who fail to abide by social rules that praise individual responsibility.
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