Against Averages | Consolidation
This is part of a series of stories, for now titled “Consolidation”. For a framing of this project, start here.
In a politics of averages, it becomes impossible for rising tides to raise all ships. There becomes an inevitable meshing of perspectives towards some central average of opinion which is not aligned with the real desires of any particular individual. Looking at the history of governance in the world, it is understandable why a system like this would emerge. The technology of politics, as it was likely imagined in the agoras of Ancient Greece, required some new mechanism for aggregating the wants and desires of those deemed deserving of the franchise. Given the tools available at the time, a politics of agglomeration, whereby the opinions of many were combined for the purposes of determining collective action made maximal use of the available tools of writing, culture, and physical space. In the millennia that followed, the changes in those communication technologies progressed only marginally. Even as mass produced writing emerged, the methods for generalizing political thought were severely limited. It was in this political schema that majoritarianism emerged. Social ideologies of the past were almost always literature based, with some founding text outlining a framework for political thought that was then applied to a real-world situation (or, rather, used to make sense of existing circumstances on the ground).
If we look at the shortcomings of many of the major movement-driven political shifts of the 20th-century, the problem with this thinking becomes clear. In writing about the ills of industrialization, Karl Marx bound his ideology to a written text which necessitated some re-interpretation of the present moment through a non-linear lens. The Russian Empire at the beginning of the century was not the same as Europe in the mid-19th century — the circumstances of life were radically different. In forcing the Russian Empire of 1917 into a 1848 textual mold (I acknowledge this is not the only intellectual basis for the Russian Revolution), the real needs to which the Russian peasantry were responding were erased. The history of the USSR which followed, the violent redistribution of land, the attempts at a centrally planned economy, the resulting famines, the hyper-violence — all are, at some level, the products of a misalignment between reality and the politics which framed that reality.
Looking at the present moment, I believe there is a new capacity for an anti-politics, or a “personalized politics” to emerge. If we look at modernity in a reduced form, we see a national and international system that is broadly misaligned from the obvious desires of human beings. Our lives are dependent on jobs with stagnating wages. Misconceived regulation prevents certain kinds of scientific or technological innovation while over-favoring financial innovation and a very narrow form of computer- and data-based innovation. Life expectancies are falling across the United States while healthcare becomes more inaccessible. Again, the purpose of this project is to outline a new kind of politics which does not blame these shortcomings on some failed political moment in the past. Healthcare is unaffordable because the model of cost reductions in production reducing prices for consumers only works sometimes. The market is extraordinarily stochastic, composed of the combination of human cognition, media, algorithms, laws, loopholes, opinions, “hype”, and purely random shocks. The belief that the neoliberal project of free market regulation is either completely evil or completely good ignores the fact that the initial project of creating a fixed political schema was always doomed. It generates beneficial things in people’s lives only sometimes. But never always.
If we are to assume, however, that there are real, physical components to our lives on this planet, then you must recognize that there should be some more-logical method of rearranging the components that does not rely on averaging out political opinions. Although fiat money is not itself a real asset, it should reflect some underlying composite of human desire and aspiration. One should only need to ask for a dollar if the perceived potential uses of that dollar are internally equatable to amount of “work” that went into generating it. It is hard to justify the accumulation of billions of dollars in this system unless you also feel that the cost of the work you put in is worth billions of dollars of value in your life. The question here should not be whether Jeff Bezos deserves one-hundred billion dollars (because who is to say). The question should be whether Jeff Bezos himself feels that he deserves it. If he does, then I think that is a very meaningful starting point for a discussion on the real value of money in the economy. I suggest a politics of ends, not means to ends. The end should be value in our lives — and I think defining a new logic of value must be the greatest project of the present moment. And value is inherently individualistic, it cannot be averaged out, the perspective cannot be imposed.
