The Meaning of Human Value

[AdSense-A]

By Radical Rhymes

What makes us valuable as people? From a societal perspective my feeling is that it’s our economic value, our productivity, what we can contribute. How else can we make sense of concepts like the ‘demographic time bomb’, where people living longer is a problem?

For centuries we, as a species, have been searching for a way of extending our short stay on this beautiful blue rock. Fountains of youth, portraits that take all our sins and give us more years, wishes from bottle entombed genies… Now that we CAN extend our years, we frame it as a problem!

Okay, I know, hands up, it isn’t living longer that’s been the goal per se, it’s doing so without ageing, retaining all the vitality and vigour of our youth. I know, I get it, and that plays straight into my theme. That people are considered valuable while they are useful. Once they are economically inactive, they lose their social, economic and political value. I’m stating it as an extreme position, but I’m confident that it’s how our system broadly operates.

Well, I want to challenge that notion. My sister mostly existed outside the economic norm. When she was 13 a blood test showed that she had early onset rheumatoid arthritis. It was only due to mum’s persistence that she wasn’t dismissed as having extreme growing pains.

From that moment on her life changed dramatically. She decided, right then and there, that she would never marry, that she would never have kids. She was conscious that it would mean a steady and terrible decline, and at that stage,

there was no indication whether it was heritable or not.

She was a model citizen really. She worked hard at school, she was intensely clever, and it showed in her results. When she left school, she was immediately recruited by a bank, and her value to them was obvious. Not only did she have a head for numbers, but she was a brilliant administrator and organiser. As a healthy person her career would have been set and defined, I have no doubt she would have a very well-regarded and wealthy woman.

But the arthritis stole that career. The pain was excruciating, and her body was already beginning to shrivel and deform by her late teens, and by her early twenties she had to give in. Social services and the medics agreed, her working life was over.

They hadn’t reckoned with her stubbornness though.

She defied them all and found employment at our local newsagents. Just as before, she became immensely important. There were times when the married couple who owned that shop left her to manage it entirely on her own. Many of her ideas reframed their operating procedures. She was brilliant.

After three or four years there the disease won again. This time there was no going back. She ran a market stall for a couple of years, but effectively her working (for money) days were numbered. These days she would have been an ebay tycoon or something, but it was finally all over. She was twenty-eight.

I guess she was still a consumer, but in productive terms she was done and dusted. The arthritis took her life at fifty. She died in hospital of septicaemia – a fact the hospital tried to hide because they feared we would sue them. How sad that is, not only would we NEVER sue the NHS, but what would her life have been worth to a monetised system?

But that isn’t the only measure of a person. My sister – for all the damage she caused me

– was fiercely intelligent, incredibly funny, and overwhelmingly powerful. I doubt there was anyone who encountered her that was not touched by her in one way or another. Years after she’d left the bank the two ladies who’d managed her would write a long letter to her every Christmas outlining their lives and asking about hers.

There is no doubt that she would have been a huge success – socially and economically – had she been well. She worked long after it was expected of her. And yet none of that matters, at least not to me.

She had value because she was my sister, but she was valuable simply because she existed. She loved horses and horse racing, she loved the Beatles, Bob Dylan and folk music. She read copiously and wrote a diary religiously.

[si-contact-form form=’2′]

Radical Rhymes is a professional artist working with a range of media – predominantly animal/human portraits and landscapes – including, most recently, hand painted furniture. You can see his work on Instagram Radicalrhymes1969 or on Twitter @RhymesRadical.

For commissions, please contact him on Twitter via Direct Message or by email at: radicalrhymes@outlook.com His work is also available to buy on Etsy