What Do We Deserve

In This World of Clusterfuckery?

A friend of mine, a lawyer, was helping another friend with a family inheritance dispute. The issue: the granny had not shared her assets fairly among her offspring, in my friend´s opinion.

Later, my lawyer friend told me this (in private): No one deserves an inheritance. An inheritance is unearned wealth.

That made me think about deservation.

What do we actually deserve?

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I think we’ve got the whole thing wrong.

We seem to think we are entitled to and deserving of this and that, but seldom think what it actually is we are entitled to - and why?

Take me, for instance, and my citizenship.

Have I done anything to earn my citizenship in one of the most prosperous Western welfare states in the world?

Did I do something to earn this good fortune? Did I deserve this?

No, I did not.

I happened to be born here and at a pretty great time in history at that. The big war was over. The world economy was recovering. No one talked about climate change, biodiversity loss, or the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. Yes, the Cold War was on, and Europe was divided into two blocs, East and West. The Soviet Union was breathing its cold breath into our necks. Kids were starving in Africa.

But life in Finland was pretty good when I was a kid. I never went to bed hungry. Or scared of anything else but imaginary monsters and my own bad dreams.

I did absolutely nothing to earn my carefree childhood.

Some would argue that, surely, since my dad had fought against the Soviets for our independence, I, his daughter, am entitled to live in this country and reap the benefits it provides for its legal residents. My dad had earned me my citizenship with his sacrifice, so to speak.

Also, I am a blonde, blue-eyed girl. I look like a proper Finn. My family has always lived here, at least as far as I can tell. I speak Finnish. It is my mother tongue.

I am as Finnish as they come.

And yet I do not feel entitled to my Finnishness in any way.

I just happened to be born here, the child of a native Finnish couple who lived and had always lived in Finland.

Even if it was by the Grace of God I was born here, I cannot take any credit for it. I don´t know why God would make us born where we are born, unless there are things called reincarnation and the Karmic law, which I am not at all certain about.

My claim to living here is no stronger, morally speaking, than that of any other person in this global village of ours.

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What do I, then, think I deserve?

I think I, as every other representative of the Homo Sapiens species, deserve pretty much what the United Nations has declared as human rights.

I deserve enough food and water not only to stay alive but to be healthy. I deserve shelter. As I live in a country that is cold for much of the year, I deserve to stay warm with proper clothing. Because I am mortal, I get sick and thus deserve care and treatment. I deserve to feel safe.

And most of all, I deserve love.

I think I really deserve these things, as does every single human fortunate enough to live on this blue jewel of a planet we call home, for this is not a planet of lack but one of amazing abundance, fully equipped to provide its inhabitants with what they need, not only to survive but to thrive.

A child in a Sudanese refugee camp and I deserve exactly the same things.

The fact that I am fine and well at the age of 67, with all my kids and grandkids alive, while the Sudanese kid starves to death before her first birthday, simply because I happened to be born Finnish and she happened to be born Sudanese, is wrong.

If this is God’s doing, then what the fuck, God?

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A memory:

In October 1994, Finland held a referendum on joining the European Union. We had just moved to Mozambique, which was then the poorest country in the world. We lived in a little town called Chimoio, near the Zimbabwean border. The place to vote was in the seaside city of Beira, a couple of hours’ drive from Chimoio.

I remember sitting in the car on the way to Beira and feeling pissed off. I was plenty mad.

I had been in Mozambique for less than three months, but that was enough for me to learn about the monstrosity of the world we lived in. The utter unfairness of it. This entire utter clusterfuckery (=my favourite word since I learned it yesterday).

Why the hell would I vote for us to join a club of privileged countries that had either colonised or benefited from the colonisation of “other” countries? I thought. We don’t need a European Union. We need the Union of the World.

So I voted no.

Finland joined the EU anyway, and I have since changed my views about it, particularly now, as the supposed bastion of freedom, the USA, appears to be unravelling.

This is a bonkers world, ruled by a species that is both incredibly smart and astonishingly stupid.

A rodent with a nuclear weapon, as the philosopher Alain de Botton has said.

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The concept of deservation should be rethought. We should go back to basics.

The age of nepo babies and trust funds should be over. No one deserves to be born super wealthy. And no one deserves to hoard more wealth than they could ever use in a lifetime.

We don’t need billionaires because nobody needs that much money, no matter how hard they worked for it. After all, it is not working hard (as in toiling) that makes you a billionaire in this economy. To become one, you have to know how to make this weird Monopoly game work in your favour.

Billionaires have become extraordinarily wealthy because of how the world economy works today. They take on “randomness that is not quantifiable”, as the MIT professor Andrew W. Lo says in an Instagram reel. Billionaires accumulate vast fortunes not by managing calculable risks but by embracing true uncertainty, you see. They navigate the “unquantifiable randomness” when launching novel industries. I don´t understand what any of that means, but it sounds right.

And then there is the Matthew Principle, straight from the Bible:

“For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” (Matthew 25:29)

The rich just get richer while the poor get poorer in this world of clusterfuckery.

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If you ask me, no one needs too much of anything, but we all need enough.

What do the super-rich need the surplus for? There are no pockets in coffins, as the Finnish saying goes.

What we need, however, is to feed the kids. Every. Single. One. Of. Them, because they totally deserve to be fed, at the very least. And they need love. Because they are all super lovable.

That should be self-evident, but apparently it is anything but.

Writing this makes me a bit depressed, so I’ll end this with a quote from one of my favourite humans, Christine de Pizan, the first woman to make her living as a writer.

The quote is from The Book of the City of Ladies (published in French in 1405):

“Do not let the bread of the hungry mildew in your larder! Do not let moths eat the poor man’s cloak. Do not store the shoes of the barefoot. Do not hoard the money of the needy. Things you possess in too great abundance belong to the poor and not to you. You are the thief who steals from God if you are able to help your neighbour and refuse to do it.”

I could not have said it better.

P.S. The images in this post of my grandkids are photos that were taken at the LEGO Jurassic World exhibition in Helsinki yesterday. These two kids are lottery winners in so many ways. So privileged. But at the same time, deserving all the care and love that every single kid in this clusterfuckery is deserving. It is because of them and the kids in Sudan and everywhere that we must do better. We must stop this nonsense and make a better world for every single one of them.