Emmanuel Levinas's Responsibility, Insurance Companies, and the 2020 Statement of Intent.

Since last December, I have been reading a book whenever I am on a plane or have some quiet time.
It is "The Other and the Dead: Levinas through Lacan." This is the second installment of Levinas theory, which is the true essence of Tatsuru Uchida, and the more I read, the more it feels like a final accounting of everything written in Uchida's books (I have read about 50 of them by now). Actually, I tried to tackle "Levinas's Love and Phenomenology" around the same time last year and failed, but I feel like I might be able to finish this one.
I haven't finished it yet, but since the year-end and New Year holidays end today,
I would like to write down my thoughts on two themes in advance.

The first is the concept of Levinas's responsibility in Chapter 4-3. The fact that he was a Jew and a Holocaust survivor is deeply ingrained in Levinas's thought. Finding a justification for why he, as a Jew, survived when he did not know why, was an urgent task for Levinas after the war. This is also linked to the theme undertaken by European intellectuals: the renewal and recasting of Western civilization, which produced such a horrific Holocaust, and the ethics and morality that underpin it.
For Levinas, in mourning the dead, it was less about comforting the spirits of those who died meaninglessly, and more about the need to bring some meaning to the fact of our own survival—the survival of those who survived meaninglessly. To endure the fundamental groundlessness of their own survival, the survivors, without exception, had to take on the mourning of the dead as their highest priority duty. We who survived had to accept a self-definition that we were chosen not because of any privilege, but to fulfill more duties and endure more suffering. Therefore, for Levinas, taking on the burden of "responsibility"—where one cannot assert that the Other (the widow, the orphan, the stranger) is "irrelevant to me"—is the only way to answer the question of "why I survived," and without this, I cannot justify why I am alive now.

I felt that Levinas's responsibility was also speaking about noblesse oblige. During my university days, while studying structural anthropology and Bourdieu's cultural capital, the conclusion I reached for myself was that "success is a matter of chance." In these fields of study, I felt they were saying that rules, like structures flowing within humans, move things rather than free will, and that elites become elites unconsciously by being born into elite families, which makes non-elites feel an irreparable and fundamental sense of being left behind.
When I got into university, I viewed the result as a product of my own tireless efforts, or, if you will, as a Nietzschean overcoming of the herd who do not make such efforts.

However, that way of thinking was clearly wrong.

The fact that my admission to university was a matter of chance gradually turned into a conviction as I faced people with a level of education I could never beat, no matter how hard I tried, and predecessors like Bourdieu and Lévi-Strauss provided logical justifications for that conviction. At the same time, I thought that since I had coincidentally entered a so-called elite university, I had to give back and contribute to society in a way that was worthy of it. Rather, that was the only justification for being in a blessed environment and was my answer to responsibility. What aligns with this way of thinking is the concept of noblesse oblige, which, in the words of Spider-Man's Uncle Ben, means "with great power comes great responsibility."

Since I have managed to get into university, I must return the benefits I gained from it to society, and if I was lucky enough to have wonderful seniors in my club, I must return those benefits by creating a club that the juniors will also feel the same way about. That was responsibility to me.
So, how should I go about this in my future life?
This is almost an afterthought, but when I learned about the concept of insurance while job hunting, it really resonated with my moral intuition.
If there are people like me who coincidentally get into university or succeed at something, there are also people who coincidentally fail to get into university or fail at something. That chance also includes accidents and sudden illnesses.
As a conclusion derived self-evidently from the groundlessness of one's own success, there is the groundlessness of failure. Inevitable failures and fatal accidents happen groundlessly and randomly. Insurance is for preparing for that. If I am walking a path that is called elite, I felt no discomfort in taking on the mission of circulating insurance as a means to reduce, even if only slightly, the "downside" for people who randomly suffer failures in the world, as a way to use the benefits I have gained.

In Levinas's terms, as someone involved in insurance, it is not permitted to say to the Other that "I am irrelevant." I think that is the responsibility of an insurance company. My company started its business because the money collected for the railway business coincidentally had a surplus. The groundlessness and contingency of one's origins must be explained by responsibility.

I have written so much on the first theme that the text has become like a "chicken leg" (a term for fitness enthusiasts who only train their upper bodies, leaving their legs abnormally thin), but I will write about the second theme.

This is my impression regarding Chapter 2-4, "The Man Who Dropped His Shoe," but I had a slightly different impression than what Tatsuru Uchida intended by citing this story. This story often appears in Uchida's books, and it is the story of Zhang Liang mastering the "secrets of military strategy" from Huang Shigong. In this book, it is cited as a story about desire and the master, linking the mystery of the old man dropping his shoe twice, but I want to cite it as a simple story about a master and the secret teachings.

The other day, a senior I respect told me, "You are losing out because of the way you speak." In that instant, I found someone there who was good at speaking. I don't think you'll understand just from this, so let me explain: that senior didn't tell me "you speak poorly," "you should fix the way you speak," or "you have solid substance," but instead said, "you are losing out because of the way you speak." I realized in an instant that someone who speaks like this is a person who is good at speaking. I understand that the senior wanted to convey the message that I should fix the way I speak. And, knowing my personality, the senior understood that if they said "you speak poorly," my pride would be hurt and I would rebel, thinking "shut up," and if they said "you have solid substance," I would take it at face value and get carried away, so they said "you are losing out because of the way you speak."

I think a person who is good at speaking is someone who can convey a core message to others and prompt them to change their behavior from the next moment on.

By saying "you are losing out because of the way you speak" without using any other words, the senior made me sincerely feel that I needed to improve my way of speaking and guided me in a good direction. At the same time, as a meta-message, they taught me a role model of a person who is "good at speaking."

Work for 2020 starts tomorrow. I will firmly realize what my senior told me, interpret the good fortune of being assigned to a department where such a senior happened to be as an expression of my own responsibility, and in order to fulfill the duty of returning the benefits gained from that, I will first do something good for the people around me.

(First, I will distribute the Korean seaweed I bought as a souvenir from my trip to Korea.)