In reflecting on Marx’s work and Zack’s blog post, I think there is merit in Zack’s claim that it is natural to want to secure that which is necessary for survival for ourselves. That being said, there must have been a transition in which we went from claiming that which is necessary to claiming that which we merely want. It’s definitely natural to claim food necessary for survival, but one cannot make the claim that owning five cars is necessary for survival. So what is it that drives us to desire these things? One could argue that our society has evolved in such a way that we stop merely desiring what we need. But why didn’t society evolve in a way that once we have secured what we need for ourselves we move on to help others secure what they need for themselves? It’s possible that while society evolved we became increasingly concerned with providing for ourselves, such that we believe if we stop trying to provide for ourselves we will lose everything. What I mean to say by this is we have been conditioned to believe not only that it is very difficult to secure the necessities for our own life, but also that we believe we need way more than we actually do to live. This could be coupled with the idea that possibly no one is going to help us but ourselves. Our society has conditioned us to be selfish. What I find interesting about his is being selfish seems counterproductive. If we lived in a society in which each person worked for the benefit of every other person, then we would probably be way better off than we are now. This brings to mind Nel Noddings’ work which I read in both ethics and philosophy of education. She describes her philosophy as an ethic of caring. She describes the caring relationship in which there is the one-caring who is the one who cares for another, and the cared-for. I don’t really want to get into too much detail (I mean her work takes a few weeks of class to go through and we don’t really have that kind of time in a blog post) but basically the goal of her work is to get every person caring for every other person. This seems like a fantastic idea, a much better way to live, but it is usually only seen in the smaller scale (usually between a mother and child, but also between a teacher and student). If we could somehow overcome our current state of selfish living, it would be to the benefit of all, however, the individuals who have more than enough are afraid that if they give up what they have and the plan backfires, they will be left much worse. Also, it seems as though with such a huge population, such organization would be difficult. All I know is our society could do much better than the current state of affairs; exactly how we could do that is yet to be seen.