I still think about how he tried to cure cancer with crystals and then when that didn’t work he used his wealth to get residency in a different state to jump in line for a transplant and still died before his yacht got completed. I don’t misunderstand him at all. Especially the parking in handicap spaces part. Very easy to understand what kind of person he was through his actions. Perhaps we will never see eye to eye, and I feel posts like yours do deserve legitimate opposition as applicable.
When you speak ill of Jobs you are speaking on his moral character. When others (incl. myself) speak positively on Jobs, they are speaking on his design, business, and life philosophies, which are quite profound. [0]
How you want to weigh the two is up to you, but it is not a contradiction to say someone contains both good and bad.
The worst part of internet culture is the conflation of simplicity and reductionism. Comments are short, people have different contexts, so there’s an instinct to reduce everything to binary and fight to the death over the binary value.
Worst of all is the false good person / bad person dichotomy that leads to great offense at any slight praise for someone the reader has decided is a bad person, or any slight criticism of someone the reader has decided is a good person.
I can’t think of anything less fruitful than arguing over whether a public figure’s personal plus professional life makes them a 100% good person or 100% bad person. It’s strange the conversation ever happens, and yet it’s so incredibly common.
Ok, but more or less everyone is going to have a few things about them that you’re not going to like. When your whole life is up for scrutiny and you have unlimited resources, that’s how it is. If you had a billion dollars there’d be plenty of things people would criticize about you. And anybody else who did too.
Sure. On the one hand, everything adhered to the letter of the law. On the other, he used his money to get served before other people in an otherwise similar position would have been able to do.
I personally view that as more of a failing in the system itself (why are there multiple lines to begin with when organ transport is a solved problem?), but it's not unreasonable to look at somebody exploiting that broken system and question their character.
It's the "at the expense of others" thing that makes it more morally grey, and the chain of cause and effect is short enough that people sometimes get up in arms about it.
For some other actions on some sort of badness scale, we have:
- Murdering people for your spare organs. Parts of China do this (somebody survived and escaped recently, so it's stirred things up a bit). Most people think this is very bad.
- Paying for somebody's organs (similar to prostitution at some level, though banned much more frequently than sex work -- if society is structurally so unequal that sacrificing part of your life for a pittance is actually attractive, that reflects poorly on that society, and we try to ban.the rich and powerful from using that power to create scenarios more like my first point).
- What Jobs did. It's technically legal, but he necessarily got an organ before somebody else for no other reason than that he had money. Did that somebody else survive? Who knows. If you factor in that it was actually many people who were displaced, did all of them survive? Unlikely. Organ donations are already fraught with ethical issues and strongly held convictions, and I'm not at all surprised that a number of people would be upset at this.
What’s the point of making a moral judgment about a bit of human nature that literally everyone in earth shares? It doesn’t make you or me superior to condemn it; we would do the same. So… what does “bad” even mean in this context?
Very many people don’t. We know there are constructs that would enable us to pay less, yet we choose to not pursue them. We are part of a society that enables us to be what we are, why should we strive to give as little as possible in return?
(And yes, we also don’t send extra money. This is not a contradiction.)
> We know there are constructs that would enable us to pay less, yet we choose to not pursue them.
Only because you don't want to put the effort in to pursuing it. If I told you you could reduce your tax bill by 20% by spinning round in your chair one time I doubt you (or anyone else) would decline.
Every entity generally seeks to take as much as they can and give back as little as they can. Individuals are generally a little less extreme, in my experience, with corporations being the worst.
My taxes are not a burden on me. While on the other hand, the local politicians have sought tax cut after tax cut, causing the library to limit services, the schools to cut down on teaching staff, infrastructure maintenance delays, less funding for local social services and city events, and more.
My paying an extra 20% wouldn't fix things, as adding to the general budget would end up simply reducing taxes further, instead of everyone sharing the load.
I hate that I've starting getting involved with local politics. I would rather code.
Or, following your self-centric analysis, I would put the effort into raising my taxes by 20% since the collective benefits give me much more than what I can do individually.
There are multiple lines because when an organ comes up, it can only last so long, so a person needs to be able to get to the hospital without a certain period of time. Usually this means driving distance. When you have a private plane, the distance expands. The organ still goes to the most sick person in line, not the one with the most money.
I was at a talk with Martine Rothblatt several years back, who created a startup for 3D printed organs. They ended up also building electric helicopters to transport those organs, because the transportation bottleneck was a huge issue.
I try not to judges peoples character when they’re looking death in the face. No one really knows what they’ll do in that scenario. Most people who can save their own life will. This was the premise of the movie SAW… how far are you willing to go to save your own life? How strong is your survival instinct? Most people are never tested, and it’s easy to sit back and judge, but would you just sit back and die? How do we even know there was someone else in line behind Jobs? It could be that he got an organ that would have otherwise been wasted.
Pancreatic cancer is known for being incurable, even in the best of circumstances, early diagnose or not. Having witnessed a family member go through the same thing, I understand Jobs's reaction of trying literally anything else.
Well, given apparently the posts in this thread reveal me to be an "manic crazy person" (or such I inferred) - I suppose I'll add to it then by saying: I too have read and understood Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra. I hadn't thought much about it till today, but, I suspect, will do as Steve did. :) :)
