Appreciate what you have

in the vein of the last posts ending:
enjoy the luxury you are afforded by living in a modern industrialized nation.

• you have personal transportation wherever you want, whenever you want
• you spend less than 25% of your time working
• you eat delicacies from around the world, prepared by natives
• you enjoy 24/7 climate control
• you have a vast selection of mating opportunities
• you enjoy a comparatively long lifespan
• you are free from the stress of being raped and killed by rival clans (unless you live in a city)
  
• you have the spare time to cultivate personal interests
• you are able to accumulate wealth for the future, rather than just subsisting
  

You are still subject to insane whims of government, but they are mild compared to the historical norm. And you additionally have the opportunity to isolate yourself from society comfortably.

Back to our regularly scheduled program

As mentioned previously, everyone has their own ideal social contract. This depends on how much freedom they are willing to give up for safety.
Many people either leave for a country that they feel more closely mimics their personal social contract, or spend their lives fighting to nudge reality a tiny bit closer to their personal social contract.
Let's look at a sample social contract: the current USA.
The current USA is a welfare state. More than half of taxes are spent on socialized medicine or socialized retirement. Whats wrong with a welfare state? It necessarily penalizes success. The successful pay a disproportionate percentage of all taxes. This is based on the theory of decreasing marginal utility of money. Clearly an extra 20 grand isn't going to significantly improve the lifestyle of a successful person, while it could be the difference between life and death for a poor person right?
So what's the problem?
This boils down to the classic question:
Is it justifiable for a starving man to steal a loaf of bread?
Well, how much does the loaf of bread cost?
Let me put it another way.
Is it justifiable to take 1% of someone's private property to save a life?
What about 2%?
What about 10%
What about taking everything that they don't need for immediate survival?
Whose life is it anyway? A saint or stalin? An elderly person who has helped thousands of people, or a spoiled child?

Like everything else, altruism should not be centralized. Individual acts of altruism are fine, but a general policy of helping the unsuccessful means you've just created a disincentive to be successful. This would be fine if we lived in a world of limitless resources, but we do not. The nations with the most successful people will claim a disproportionate amount of the available resources and increase the standard of living of its people. The nations that do not baby their citizens will eventually wind up ahead. The nations that are ahead dictate the rules of the game to the detriment of everyone else. Nations that are uncompetitive therefore wind up servile towards those that are. The US did not become powerful through any particular cleverness of its own. It was merely the only industrial nation not destroyed by WW2. Continuing in the direction of penalizing success will ultimately unseat the US from its #1 spot.

So what is a U.S citizen such as myself to do when i disagree with the social contract of my nation? move? spend my life advocating libertarianism?
No, the prudent course of action is to accumulate enough resources that it is possible to avoid the whims of others entirely.
To do this we simply select courses of action that will maximize our wealth for a given amount of labor.
Unfortunately, this still requires a good chunk of your life to achieve, but merely having the opportunity to emancipate yourself from the whims of others is a privilege few humans have ever had.

Labelling

Humans love to categorize things. It is comforting, because the mysterious is frightening. We encounter new things, and struggle to fit it into our existing categories. When this doesn't work, we invent a new category. We generally explain this new category in terms of being a hybrid of two old categories or some such. This applies well to the world of physics, where we need a metaphor based on the scale we are familiar with to make sense of things (i.e. particles are like billiard balls, or waves).
However, like most things, we take it too far. We often apply a label to something and allow the label to function as an answer. Q:"Why does matter attract matter?" A:"Matter curves spacetime". I remember hearing this explanation along with a nice little diagram of a ball making a dip that other balls would roll towards. We use a label and feel like we know the answer. We then leave the underlying questions unanswered. Why does matter curve spacetime? What do we mean by spacetime? Is there a uniform background against which we can measure curvature? Why would a curve necessarily lead to attraction anyway?
This type of thinking very handily displays a cognitive bias towards things that are understandable in terms of the environment we are adapted to. Of course our descriptions of reality break down at the very small and the very large. The place where they break down are the natural boundaries beyond which our common sense (adapted to running from predators on a prairie) can no longer make a metaphor out of things we observe at our scale.

Of course this doesn't explain why our math should continue to consistently apply at all scales...maybe it doesn't.