The Social Contract Is Broken
The Dark Arithmetic of Modern Civilization
In Civilization and Its Discontents – my favorite of Sigmund Freud’s works – Freud proposes that the purpose of life is happiness: to become happy and to remain so.[i] On this most consequential point, the Dalai Lama concurs. “I believe,” he writes, “that the very purpose of life is to seek happiness.”[ii] The American Declaration of Independence echoes the same conviction, enshrining the pursuit of Happiness among humanity’s unalienable rights.
Freud further argues that human suffering arises primarily from three sources: the decay and eventual death of our bodies, the uncontrollable forces of nature, and the fraught relationships we have with one another.[iii] In this, he is again broadly aligned with Buddhist philosophy. Modern empirical research supports these insights. In Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, the economist Richard Layard reports that human well-being depends most strongly on material security, trust in friends and in the wider community, and a sense of social equality.[iv]
Civilization[v], Freud maintained, exists largely to mitigate these sources of suffering and provide a measure of happiness by protecting us from nature’s dangers and by regulating our “mutual relations” with others.[vi] The historian Carroll Quigley made a similar observation, writing that “culture intervenes as a kind of insulation” between human beings and their natural environment.[vii]
According to the American Declaration of Independence and the Enlightenment philosophers who influenced this work, this protective function is not incidental; it is society’s moral obligation. Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth argued that the best society is the one that produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
If civilization’s raison d’être has been to reduce suffering and foster the conditions for human flourishing, then – by that standard – it has largely failed. For most of its approximately six thousand years of existence, civilization has been a poor bargain. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, human material and psycho-spiritual conditions were no better than those of our foraging ancestors and, in many respects, markedly worse.[viii] Hunter-gatherers were healthier, more egalitarian, and worked far fewer hours than early agricultural peoples, leading the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins to famously describe them as “the original affluent society.”[ix]
Agricultural civilizations were plagued by famines in ways that foraging societies largely were not, producing both acute suffering and chronic insecurity. There are those—usually among the small fraction who have benefited most from civilization’s surpluses—who argue that the achievements of high culture justify this suffering: the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, global air travel, cathedrals, symphonies, and the paintings now housed in the museums of former colonial powers. But the billions who lack life’s basics, who have never traveled beyond the horizon of their neighborhood, and who have virtually no chance of improving their circumstances may find little consolation in such arguments.
If we could devise a measure of cumulative suffering – human and nonhuman alike – or imagine the perspective of an omniscient, all-feeling observer, we might better comprehend civilization’s moral ledger. Since the Industrial Revolution, the human population has increased seven-fold, and the total burden of suffering has expanded accordingly. What follows is only a partial list summarizing some of the most egregious forms of human deprivation today:
· Some 3.5 billion people live in poverty, over 700 million of whom live in extreme poverty (on less than $2.15 a day.)
· More than 670 million people are chronically hungry.
· About 2.3 billion people – nearly 30 percent of the global population – are moderately to severely food insecure.
· 828 million people – more than one in ten, globally – are severely food insecure, meaning they ran out of food during the year and went entire days without food.
Between four and five billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. This form of malnourishment is called “hidden hunger” because the effects of deficiencies of iron, zinc, magnesium, Vitamin A, iodine (among others) are not always acutely visible.[x]
And unknown billions of these individuals are physically and cognitively stunted and suffer from preventable diseases their malnourished bodies cannot fight.
Each year, an estimated 9 million die “from hunger and related causes,” while “11 million die due to unhealthy diets.”
· There are as many as sixty billion cases of gastrointestinal disease annually, resulting in over two million child deaths from diarrheal illness.
· 2.1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water, and 3.4 billion lack basic sanitation services.
· 1.5 billion people in poorer countries are infected with parasitic worms.
· Nearly 300 million new cases of malaria occur each year, killing more than 600,000 people.
· 1.2 billion people live without electricity.
· An estimated 50 million people are enslaved worldwide – more than ten times the number enslaved in the American South at the height of U.S. slavery.[xi]
· Some 138 million children are engaged in child labor, including 54 million in hazardous work. Millions more work under “horrific circumstances”: 1.2 million children are trafficked, 5.7 million are trapped in debt bondage or forced labor, 1.8 million are forced into prostitution and/or pornography, 300 thousand serve as child soldiers in armed conflicts.
One may argue that society has no obligation to guarantee universal material security. Yet this position runs counter to the Enlightenment principles upon which Western democracies grounded their legitimacy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, argued that political authority rests on a form of social contract: individuals do not choose the state into which they are born, so legitimacy requires that both citizen and state benefit from the arrangement.
In that light, what obligation do economically marginalized people (those who receive little benefit from schools, food systems, police protection, or infrastructure) have to obey society’s rules? If society fails to provide even a minimal level of material security, it may be in the rational economic and Darwinian self-interest of the poor to revert to a pre-state “rule of the jungle.” Those who benefit most from the state will label such actions criminal. Rather than perpetuating centuries-long disputes over blame, ensuring a basic floor of material security for all would serve the interests of everyone and it would bring civilization closer to the purpose it has long claimed as its own.
[i] Freud (1929:25).
[ii] HH Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler (1998:13). Easterlin (1974) found that happiness and the variables that affect it “transcends individual cultures.”
[iii] Freud (1929:24-42).
[v] Civilization, as I am using the term, refers to a complex human society often centered around cities and characterized by shared laws, a hierarchical social system and division of labor, a food supply based on intensive agriculture, and often a written language.
[vi] Freud (1929:24-42). Carroll Quigley (1961) wrote “culture intervenes as a kind of insulation” between a person and his natural environment.
[ix] Sahlins (1972). There are always exceptions, of course, such as the Shoshone in the arid, resource-scarce environs of the American Great Basin, for whom hunger and famine were not uncommon (Johnson and Earle, 2000:58-65).
[x] Until this study, “more than 2 billion” malnourished people, globally, was the number cited by the various United Nations organizations. A 2024 Lancet study found that on the basis of estimates of nutrient intake from food (excluding fortification and supplementation), more than 5 billion people do not consume enough iodine (68% of the global population), vitamin E (67%), and calcium (66%). More than 4 billion people do not consume enough iron (65%), riboflavin (55%), folate (54%), and vitamin C (53%).
[xi] Gutman, H.G. (1989:204).