Social Obligations

Occasionally, when we have to decline an invitation we’d love to accept because of a prior commitment we don’t really cherish, we console ourselves by muttering that there’s really no choice, it’s “a social obligation.”  That’s a small phrase that covers a lot of territory.  Sometimes it just means a cheerful chat when we’d love to walk away. Other times, it could stretch to substantial aid to family or friends who have suffered catastrophe.  Occasionally it could stretch all the way to disaster relief in Turkey or Indonesia.  In general, it’s a recognition that we owe our fellow human beings many things that go beyond the immediately agreeable or profitable, that we are all mutual participants in a network of humanity.  It’s something that the “only what’s in it for me” crowd would just as soon forget, unless of course they are the ones in distress.  Forgetting comes easiest when it can be done in the name of maximizing corporate profits and protecting individualism. 
Our national ideology of individualism, “beholding to no man and no man beholding to me”, obscures the natural human reciprocity that shows up in times of great trauma, and it makes us easy targets of the corporate warfare on our national interests.  One of the current major targets of that warfare is the obligation to care about those who did, but no longer work for you.  In these recessionary times, unemployment benefits are just too great a burden on the health of the corporation and the economy: so goes the screed.  And retirees are living ”too high off the hog” for corporate profits to bear because of Social Security cost of living increases, which must be trimmed for the seniors own moral good. That profits-only orientation is hidden in the argument made that senior retirement benefits prevent adequate care for the young.  Nonsense!  Both young and old must be cared for, even at the expense of corporate profit.  Harold Myerson commented in the Washington Post a few weeks ago that this currently fashionable rant ignores the fact that in the last 35 years, the working careers of most seniors, retirement incomes outside Social Security benefits have actually gone down, leaving more and more seniors unable to afford retirement – of course, that’s no concern to the corporations who “downsize” them anyway in favor of younger, cheaper workers; that massive senior “downsizing” is one of the invisible prices we are paying for rampant individualism. Older and younger workers both get laid off – no age discrimination there – but it’s the younger workers who get rehired.  Older workers are left to the early retirement they can’t afford.  That’s when the switch from defined benefit retirement plans to 401(K) plans initiated by corporations beginning in the 1970’s kicks in; in 1975, 88 percent of workers with retirement plans had defined benefit plans, while by 2010 that number had fallen to 35 percent. Corporations saved a lot of money that way, none of it going to the workers.  But a 2010 Federal Reserve survey found that retiring workers typically had only about a $100,000 IRA (which would yield at best about $5000 a year in current income, assuming no market crashes) with no other retirement income sources to supplement their Social Security benefits – totally inadequate for long-term retirement.  That’s the setting for the proposals to reduce Social Security cost of living increases.  Corporate interests and ideology are increasingly drowning out the voice of individuals, in the name of protecting laissez-faire individualism.

That’s where social obligation enters the picture.  Our retirement and our health care financing systems are based on employer and individual worker contributions; in an age where corporate ownership is increasingly remote from concerns over individual former workers, we must find alternatives.  In 1950, over half those Americans over 65 lived in poverty; pursuing our current course, we are headed back in that direction.  It would constitue a national tragedy, as well as countless personal ones.  Other nations not so blinded by rampant individualism as ours have developed public, not employer based, systems, a recognition on their part of an important social obligation.  We need to look to places like Germany for examples of what can be done while still prospering in a reasonable fashion.  What they do may or may not work for us, but something must be found.  Like it or not, it’s a social obligation.