Saving Pain

Imagine a world without pain. Not just the physical sort, but all manner of suffering. No headaches or hunger, no heartache or humiliation, no muscle aches, no poverty, no toothaches, no guilt. Paradise? Well, as any good science fiction writer can tell you, paradise only works in Paradise. To try to recreate it in our world gives you something else.

There’s a rare genetic disorder called CIPA, and those very few with this malady suffer from a lack of suffering. They feel no pain. Take the case of Roberto Salazar. As a newborn, his parents thought he was the perfect baby. He slept peacefully, never cried to eat, soiled diapers didn’t bother him. At three months though, he stopped eating. You see he felt no hunger. Eventually a feeding tube had to be attached directly to his stomach. As he grew older he proved to be very susceptible to heatstroke on hot days. He didn’t sweat; his body didn’t know he was hot. When he started teething he would gnaw on his own tongue. He didn’t know his tongue was his tongue. His parents couldn’t hold him on a warm day because his body would suck up the heat from their bodies and wouldn’t even know it. CIPA is a deadly paradise. Such children used to have a 50% chance of living to the age of five. With recent advancements they now have a 50% chance of living to the ripe old age of 40.

There is a purpose for pain. Just as there is a purpose for guilt, shame, suffering, and poverty. These are things that cause us enough discomfort that we are motivated to avoid the things that cause them, and avoiding these things helps us to survive as individuals and as a society. We live in a time and culture where people see all suffering as evil, and all elimination of suffering as good. Truth is, it’s much more complex. Some suffering, like some pain, is detrimental to our health; but some suffering, possibly even most suffering, is instrumental to our health. As a society we can’t remove the primal motivation for socially responsible behavior and expect our society to survive. We should indeed be charitable, we should indeed seek to alleviate that detrimental suffering, we should indeed love our neighbor… but we must not rob others of saving pain.

When we attempt to diminish the level of suffering through the process of “fairness” to the point that the unemployed or underemployed enjoy nearly the same basic standard of living as those who are more gainfully employed; and this we do not just by giving benefits to some, but by also taking benefits from others; then we destroy the simplest of motivational models. We take a segment of the population that is arguably less motivated to begin with (and yes, I know that is a generalization), and we remove some of the strongest motivation they might have. Worse still, we teach those who were the more motivated among us that their efforts will cost them, and to a great extent are pointless. I know it’s not a perfect equation, and that there are other factors, but if you think that these dynamics are not very real conditions and motivators, then you need to come down from your ivory tower for awhile and walk with me in the mean streets of reality.

IMHO: It is hard to fault people for wanting to eliminate suffering. Raising the minimum wage and endlessly extending unemployment insurance may seem like charitable causes; EBT cards instead of actual food stamps to eliminate the stigma of government assistance might seem to be a compassionate act. “Spreading the wealth around” from those who have “won life’s lottery” to those who have been “less fortunate” might sound like fairness (especially to those on the receiving end). But unfortunately such well meaning (or possibly just politically expedient) mandated “fairness” is one of the things that led to the fall of the Roman Empire, and it will crumble our own. Eliminating suffering will not bring the paradise that some believe it can. We need suffering. We need pain. Those trying to find paradise through legislation, entitlements, and taxation may be well intentioned, but it is not the road to Paradise that is paved with good intentions.