freeloading neighbor<\/a>. His family needs help, sometimes urgently. A few neighbors have given it. His response: he alienates the helpers. Never keeps his word. Never returns stuff he borrows. Never reciprocates. Always just expects more.<\/p>\nOf course, this is one reason his family is so needy. Because he doesn’t bother to think: “If you screw over the people who help you, they might not help you next time.”<\/p>\n
Hobbit — who was a public defender and is now a judge — sees people like this (and worse) all the time. <\/p>\n
As a freedomista, he doesn’t like the standard fines-jail-community-service treatment. He experiments with other options designed to help petty offenders think more about their own actions. (Or maybe just think more, period. He once “sentenced” a woman to read 10 books. When she reported back to him, she had become quite a fan of Nostradamus. Not exactly what he intended, but perhaps a start.)<\/p>\n
He’s aiming toward methods that do two related things: get people to think longer term and get them to develop regular habits. “It doesn’t have to be ant-like conformity and productivity,” he says, “but at least let’s not be a drain on the system. It’s nice to help carry some of the Big Load, but if you can’t, at least carry your own.”<\/p>\n
Regular habits may be boring; free spirits reject them. But smart<\/i> free spirits find ways to make their irregular<\/i> habits work for them. For the average Joe or Josie just trying to get by, those two things — long-term thinking and regular (good) habits — are keys to the kingdom.<\/p>\n
Then fewer of them would be standing in front of Hobbit explaining that they didn’t show up yesterday for their court date because their truck got impounded two weeks ago. (“And why didn’t you make some other arrangement to get here?” Duhhhhh.)<\/p>\n
Fewer of them would be going on personal finance sites and asking questions like, “My credit score is 537 and my car just got repossessed and my credit cards are maxed out except the four that are already in collections. But I’m tired of renting so how do I get 100 more points on my score in three months so I can have a house?”*<\/p>\n
These are “People who really have no sense of the past, no sense of the future, no understanding of cause and effect, and just sort of live in the ‘now’ like some sort of land dwelling sea cucumber.” <\/p>\n
Never mind that they’ve been encouraged in their attitudes by the entitlement state. Even libertopia would have some people like this. “Badly brought up,” as our grandmothers might have said.<\/p>\n
It’s admittedly (and literally) paternalistic, but Hobbit says sometimes being a judge is like being a father to overgrown children — a father who’s trying to Give a Responsibility Clue rather than a meaningless punishment.<\/p>\n
We freedomistas talk a lot about responsibility and about restitution by criminals to their victims. (Hobbit’s judge motto: “Restitution, remediation, reintegration.”) But how to get from theory to real-world results? How go the specifics?<\/p>\n
So here’s a two-part question for you: 1) Are there people in the world who will simply never<\/i> develop long-term thinking no matter how many carrots, sticks, or major reality checks they’re given? And 2) If you were a judge (you can pretend it’s in some free-market arbitration system if you can’t see yourself as the kind of judge who gets a government paycheck), what would you do to try to instill long-term thinking in hapless, aimless, clueless short-term thinkers who came before you in court?<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
* Which is, I’m sorry to report, an extremely typical question on a certain site I visit. Except I’ve fixed the spelling and grammar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was e-talking the other day with the Infamous Oregon Law Hobbit. Turns out he and I both had the same thing on our minds: the problem of long-term thinking. Or rather, the problem of people who don’t do it. People who won’t (can’t?) consider that Action A will lead to Consequence B. Case in point: My freeloading neighbor. His family needs help, sometimes urgently. A few neighbors have given it. His response: he alienates the helpers. Never keeps his word. Never returns stuff he borrows. Never reciprocates. Always just expects more. Of course, this is one reason his family…<\/p>\n
Continue readingResponsibility 101: Long-term thinking<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mind-and-spirit","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}