🌊 Imagine yourself bobbing helplessly in the icy Atlantic Ocean. Your ship sank. You can hear the cries of other desperate survivors, women, children, men off in the distance.
🚣♂️Suddenly a lifeboat appears. It has seating and provisions for 50 people. Only you see the lifeboat. You climb aboard, dry yourself off, and grab the oars.
🎈 You are saved.
📒 The Lifeboat Dilemma is a famous ethical test, created by Garrett Hardin. The Lifeboat Dilemma asks you to determine how many people you can save given scarcity in a dire set of circumstances.
⚖ Hardin used the example to get people thinking about ethics. What he might not have reckoned on is that a great many people don't think about saving people ...at all.
👫 There are, instead, two categories of people, with two very different sets of ...'values'.
🧮Some people *do* think about how many people they can save. They start doing the math, calculating if and how the lifeboat can take in more people than the capacity, if children should be prioritized so more can fit... These sort of people calculate how to ration the food so it lasts longer.
🧐Then, there is another kind of person entirely. The kind of person who sits down and thinks: "This lifeboat and all of the provisions are mine. All of it - MINE."
⚒️And then when desperate drowning people try to climb aboard, this kind of person uses the oars to club people over the head to keep them away.
👺Unfortunately, I have met a lot of the latter kind of person in my years in business and here online. Raised in a white, Conservative household, I was taught to how to 'get mine', and that cruelty and 'tough love' in life and business was ...good.
👵 👴 But I soon learned that being selfish, hoarding resources, turning my back on others ...always meant anger, nihilism and self-destruction in the end. I watched people who lived that way die alone, despised by everyone, even their own families.
🤔 What kind of person are you? What kind of person do you want to be?
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