Cognitive Expense and Being-in-the-world | Consolidation
This is part of a series of stories, for now titled “Consolidation”. For a framing of this project, start here.
In pursuit of this goal of consolidation around a new logic of individual-driven political ideology (or political technology), I think it is important here to more clearly define what I believe are the shortcomings of the current system. Although I have used the term “majoritarian” to describe movement-based ideologies of the past, it may be more constructive to think about this at a lower level of abstraction. To this end, I offer the concept of “cognitive expense”, which roughly describes the tangible costs of following ones own internal political logic. Borrowing terminology from Martin Heidegger, all humans are burdened by their already “being-in-the-world”. In my own thinking, this describes the unending whirlwind of circumstances through which people must attempt to make sense of their present moment. The unstopping nature of time, the incapacity for any person to extricate themselves from the present moment, means that all macro-level considerations of current conditions must be at some level separate from the realities of the world. Reduction and assumption must follow. At the exact moment of self-realization, that realized self must face new realities which likely would produce some different perception of what a proper course of action would be. It is this dissonance, between the manufactured idea of the present moment and the chaotic, entropic moment as it really is, that requires some cognitive process of reduction or ignorance — “cognitive expense”.
All politics operate within an economy of cognitive expenses. Electing candidates and supporting the creation of new policies (perhaps at two or three level of removal) relies on uncomfortable, paradoxical truths. All politics must be backward looking, responding to some positive or negative perception of the past, in the hopes of steering the creation of some foreseeable future. This task is impossible. National responses to COVID-19 offers the most-extreme example of the futility of this task. The seeds of the responses to the virus were in-built into the system precisely because policy approaches all issues with an uncompromising rigidity. If we visualize policy responses as concentric circles, administrative-executive function in the United States* consists of political though embedded within written policy embedded within a fixed, duopolistic power system. In each of these stacked layers, more and more assumptions are made about the world around it — and all point towards some theoretical preferred future, often defined as “progressivism” or “conservatism”.
The fundamental paradox of these rigid layers is that they provide the skeleton framework and structure to realities which are far more complicated than their underlying opinions. Policy addressing the rights of workers in post-manufacturing communities in the middle of the country, for example, must reconcile both the causes and consequences of economic distress. They must protect the rights of workers within an aggressive and all-consuming financial-industrial structure while also following the logic of globalized production. The “worker” is an impossible to define amalgamation of employees of convenience (“I am getting the first job that hires me.”), employees of passion (“I passionately love working with my hands and so I want this job.”), employees of convention (“Getting this type of job is what people in my community do.”) — and all workers are all of these categories (and more) all of the time to constantly shifting degrees. To define policy that somehow engages all of these needs equally is challenging. To define a political macro-structure that somehow consistently addresses these needs through the lens of “progressivism” or “conservatism” is clearly impossible.
That challenge, however, is one that must be answered by politics. The costs of not solving them are real — and often drive political decision-making. The costs of solving them through effective individual-level government action entails high costs. My argument is that those costs must be equilibrated, and that majoritarian politics is not an effective algorithm to produce that end. The problem with movement-based solutions is that they insist on some equilibration to a median perception of reality which can never truly exist. It is in these averaging outs of political though that substantial losses are generated. It is that averaging that produces political hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. The goal of this series is to outline the contours of what a new political algorithm of the present moment might look like. What might the “political party” appear as when it leans into the uncertainty of its constituents, into the individuality and ever-changing nature of politics as it really is. I imagine this will involve some synthesis of technology, culture, communication, media, and all of the other trappings of the modern “platform” (termed here in the Bratton-esque formulation of the word). Agility must be in-built. Human beings cannot exist in averages. I hope to have a framework for this new way of thinking by the end of this series.
*I choose here to use the example of the United States because that is my own personal domain and I do not feel informed enough to make judgements about the frameworks of other national governments without conducting further research.
