Section V.4H of II.1 (“The Problem of Scale (Part 1)”)
A Disabled World to Address Thymos, Ever-Waiting in a Cave, Before Scarcity Is Lack
Have “model” and “reality” become indistinguishable?
A sentiment that many thinkers of the Modern Counter-Enlightenment might share, Ivan Illich once said ‘that the more traditionally I speak, the more radically alien I become.’⁶⁷⁷ Illich was considered a radical (even Marxist), but Illich never viewed himself that way; as Martin Buber said he simply walked to a window and pointed, so Illich simply opened the books of history and asked us if we noticed something unquestioned had changed. Illich simply realized that humanity hadn’t always lived the same way; his eyebrows rustled and he whispered, ‘Now, nobody has said about himself ‘I am a life’ […] ‘Life is always spoken about as something which another person is.’⁶⁷⁸ Indeed, in a disabled world, life is found elsewhere. ‘[M]odel and reality [have] becom[e] indistinguishable,’ he adds, perhaps petting his dog.⁶⁷⁹ ‘[It is] very difficult to say that […] earth and soil are still the same thing.’⁶⁸⁰ If they are divided because “idea” and “thing” now exist apart after the Enlightenment, our historic period is one faced with the question, “How might we negate/sublate the difference between soil and earth?” Is this our challenge? Is being people of ideas needed for Childhood? Perhaps if ideas are needed to think “lack” as distinct from and sublative of “scarcity.”
Illich ‘based himself from the outset on the assumption that development was a doomed enterprise, jobs for all a destructive utopia, and the monopoly of commodities over satisfaction a prescription for envy and frustration.’⁶⁸¹ Illich saw no need for the State to employ Orwellian fear or Huxleyan pleasure: if the system grew large and complex, it would prove disabling of the people, and then the people would organize themselves like Josef K into “capture” and control. But perhaps it is necessary to weaken and disable us after “the death of the scapegoat,” following the theories of René Girard? Indeed, perhaps the weakening of Thymos by Neoliberalism is our only hope of peace, following Francis Fukuyama — both Fukuyama and Girard might see “disablement” as a small price to pay to assure the world doesn’t slip into apocalyptic conflict. And perhaps it is a good “tradeoff,” and certainly could be the best we can hope for where we do not know “how to leave Plato’s Cave on our own.” But if the Great Stagnation is going to eventually fall below the DEH, which will during this (what some have called) “Fourth Turning” lead a Global Depression, seeing as depressions lead to sociopolitical turmoil, this “good tradeoff” might have an expiration date and prove only “a temporary address.” Time might be running out, which means a negation/sublation is now required. That is what we are considering, for the future in Hegel is better than the past — if there is a future.
Where there is development, there is disablement for Illich, which means there is boredom (that is our responsibility for feeling), and so arises “safety” and “peace” in everything being incapable. We can’t do anything, and so we cannot fight. And so we might see in Neoliberalism and Capitalism an effort to deal with the problem of Thymos and conflict by disabling it. Is that what this is all about? Has the system grown great in size to become disabling and so able to deal with one of the greatest challenges, the human challenge of Thymos? Our longing for recognition and capability and meaning? And in disabling it, have we gained peace? Indeed, perhaps we have gained “a great peace” between WWII and now, as Steven Pinker discusses in The Better Angels of Our Nature — but at what cost? Taleb is critical of Pinker’s account, believing that the lack of war could simply mean an increase of the severity of war if it were to occur (deterrence creates peace through overall fragility), but still, Pinker seems to have a point. Yes, perhaps until he doesn’t, until it becomes apparent that we have avoided war through self-devouring. The world will not end in a fiery hell-storm where all have learned to be nihilists or enjoy the taste of our own flesh. Our body broken for us.
Not Orwell, not Huxley — Illich, Kafka (perhaps the “benevolent parents” of Tocqueville). Why do people accept their disablement though? Orwellian fear seems “vivid” and easier to see, thus easier to know we should resist (even if we fail); Huxleyan pleasure is harder to know we should resist, but if pleasure eventually reaches a saturation point that makes us bored, that could mean even pleasure eventually brings about a movement against it. But disablement? What can we do if we are disabled? At the very least, we could know the system disabled us and motivate the next generation to rise against it, but that is not what has happened; if anything, the system has been moralized even more (strengthening Affliction and Discourse). Why? Illich understood how: the system made our disablement our fault — a critical and even nefarious move. As Illich put it:
‘there is a tremendous difference in modern society being born to poor parents and having learned in school that the reason why I have remained poor is my having failed in school’⁶⁸²
Goodness. Many have warned that the schooling system simply reflects and reinforces wealth disparity and class difference, and here Illich is suggesting that it is almost necessary of the system to entail a function which makes people responsible for their failures and shortcomings; otherwise, people might blame the system and attempt to overthrow it. Now, there’s a danger in throwing out “responsibility” as a virtue entirely (which I am very critical of in “On Responsibility” by O.G. Rose), and perhaps a reason why avoiding disablement is so important is precisely because “personal responsibility” is basically impossible without it, other than as manipulation favoring the system and Discourse. How can we be personally responsible if we are disabled? It would not seem possible, and so responsibility ends up defined relative to what “empowers us thanks to the system.” Taking responsibility for “building our own house” or some other skill or product outside “wage labor” does not function as evidence that we are “responsible,” but instead responsibility is defined relative to our position in a hierarchy or our use of professional services or expert goods. And if we don’t, we are irresponsible, and that is our fault. And this is the trick move: responsibility is using the system, and it is our fault if we don’t succeed according to the system. And so the system wins.
If “On Responsibility” by O.G. Rose is correct that we cannot function well without a notion of responsibility, than this is all the more reason for us to resist disablement, precisely so that there might be a notion of “personal responsibility” that doesn’t just mean alignment with the system and Discourse. Unfortunately, where a people are disabled, the system will likely “seem” like a system of empowerment, and for some (in some sense) it will be, but it’s main function might be to make those who fail responsible for their failure. Then, if they try to organize a resistance or protest against the system, it will be hard for them to succeed. After all, it’s their fault they failed. Things could have been different.
As we’ve discussed, ‘Illich defined shadow work as the unpaid labor necessary to sustain a commodity-intense society based on jobs. Getting to one’s job, shopping, and similar activities required to make commodities serviceable are forms of shadow work,’ and “shadow work” reduces what is so worked to “a shadow of its former self.”⁶⁸³ ‘[W]ork [has] increasingly identified with paid work, and all other work [is] considered some kind of toil which [can] only be identified through only one characteristic: that [it is] not paid, or not properly paid.’⁶⁸⁴ And so the work which could make us able becomes foolish and irrational, the work we should not do. We ought to be like the rats in utopia, and if we are not in utopia, it is our responsibility. And so we are given a new kind of mind, indirectly incubated in us by Discourse, possible because of the benefits of Rhetoric that are so hard to keep, the Rhetoric which made possible the Great Enrichment and modern world — a blessing/curse that has now found itself (ironically) contributing to a vice under a regime of disablement. The best of things becomes the worst of things when corrupted, we learn from Illich, and so it may go with “personal responsibility” and “making something of ourselves.” To strive for greatness under conditions of disablement is to gain the cheese of a rat’s utopia. Victory. Devouring.
Ivan Illich strikes me as a thinker who calls for us to negate/sublate our current moment. He is Hegelian and looks to the past like Hegel to make points as Hegel. Epochs reach ends in which they must negate/sublate or the consequences are dire (and perhaps they arise with the flying Owel at Fourth Turnings, thus sewn into civilization). McCloskey is often very critical of Karl Polanyi, but Polanyi was influential on Illich in making him ‘aware how recent, and how anomalous historically, a market society based on scarcity really [was].’⁶⁸⁵ Things have not always been this way, and so there is hope: this means things don’t have to be this way. In the past more than in the future, there is reason to believe in change.
We have been on guard for Orwellian fear, and we have shouted into the wilderness about Huxleyan pleasure; meanwhile; in the background, Discourse disabled us, those who could only think and see Orwellian fear and Huxleyan pleasure, precisely because we were under Affliction. “Leaving Plato’s Cave on our own” was perhaps thought to be a matter of avoiding Orwell or Huxley (as Discourse would have us think), and so we have waited to be “dragged,” and while we waited we have “stimulated demand,” and “stimulated demand,” and “stimulated demand”…eventually it seems like this strategy will never fail, like the “stimulation” will never fail to stimulate. And eventually we forget Rhetoric and lose the capacity to think a difference between “creating” and “stimulating,” and so we begin calling stimulation “creation,” and thus our Affliction is sealed. We become “creators” as stimulators. We become disabled as “practical.” We make the most of our potential by losing it. And if a generation comes to realize this, the next generation might not get the memo and try the same strategy, and it might work for a time. But a little less than before. Than a little less. Than a little less…the DEH approaching. And perhaps eventually the younger generation realizes that consumption and “stimulating demand” brings little joy. They become “bad nihilists” of a Fourth Turning, realizing the truths of technology sooner. And then we either prove able to “create” in an actual sense or time is up, and why at this point would we know “how to ‘create’ in an actual sense?” Possibilities of negation/sublation become realities of self-effacement — alone.
After I learned about “disablement” from Illich, I saw it everywhere: in people discussing sports instead of playing them; in people critiquing art instead of making it; in citizens disgusted by politicians because they couldn’t engage in politics — all evidence of a disabled people. Because we have the power to critique though, it can feel like we have power, for is not a judge powerful? Ah, but this is the only power allowed of the disabled: we can be critics, but we cannot make. But this isn’t so bad, is it? Creating is hard and existential, and often it can seem as if the critic has the upper-hand and social capital (as critical people seem to have Game Theory advantages in social dynamics: the one who takes the dominate strategy first wins, as discussed in “The Game Theory on Why Many Conversations Are Bad and Democracy Likely Doomed” by O.G. Rose). A road of creation is a road of risk and possible rejection, and if the system disables us from creating, is that such a loss? It lets us critique (perhaps mainly “the disabled,” at least); isn’t that good enough? And so we are allowed to feel empowered and “capable” in judging and critiquing, which then has us work on behalf of Discourse and disablement, for if anyone tries to create anything, we critique them. We let them know they are out of line. And so people do not create. And so Discourse increases its victory over Rhetoric.
How have we dealt with the gradual slip into a Great Stagnation and then below the DEH? This “slow fade,” this whimper instead of a bang? Disabled and uncreative, we have manufactured stories. We have spoken of “status,” of “making something of ourselves,” of “having a career.” Overall, we have manufactured “scarcity,” or so goes one of Ivan Illich’s most incredible claims. Scarcity is created by the system for benefit of the system: what ultimately legitimates the system in our mind is produced by the system. He writes:
‘The assumption of scarcity is fundamental to economics, and formal economics is the study of values under this assumption. But scarcity, and therefore all that can be meaningfully analyzed by former economics, has been of marginal importance in the lives of most people through most of history. The spread of scarcity into all aspects of life can be chronicled; it has occurred in European civilization since the Middle Ages. Under the expanding assumption of scarcity, peace acquired a new meaning, one without precedent anywhere but in Europe. Peace came to mean pax aeconomica. Pax aeconomica is a balance between formally ‘economic’ powers.’⁶⁸⁶
When all we know is how to “stimulate demand,” we need means to stimulate people, and a powerful way we do so is with stories. And scarcity is a powerful story. Wait, does this mean we have been sold a lie? That scarcity is not a problem? Illich suggests that, if it is a problem, it is not as foundational of a problem as we think. How does this align with McCloskey? Doesn’t the Great Enrichment only make sense as indeed an “enrichment” from a basis of scarcity? Ah, but Illich might say that is how we’ve been trained to think: it is not the case that we must see the world in terms of scarcity to create. After we invent the laptop, we might look back and think that “the laptop was scarce to them,” but that is not how people lived: they did not know about the laptop, and so they did not live as if they didn’t have it. Sure, we today have things that people in the past did not have, but they did not define themselves as “living with scarcity.” That is the difference, the “towardness”: the entire socioeconomic system today is defined as “dealing with the problem of scarcity,” as if scarcity is an essential facet of our everyday lives. Illich notes that humanity in the past did not think of itself as such, but perhaps a reason Discourse has us define ourselves in light of scarcity (as technology “enframes” and defines us in light of itself) is precisely so it might “stimulate demand,” because if we define ourselves as suffering scarcity, we are more likely to buy and work for a wage so that we might deal with our scarcity. Scarcity makes us good consumers, and if we are bad consumers, the economy might fail and we might fall below the DEH. And honestly, if we don’t know how “to leave Plato’s Cave on our own” at scale, which is to “create demand,” do we honestly have a better strategy? Probably not, and so let us not be quick to judge.
Illich makes a compelling case that “human scarcity” is a modern invention, but even if this is not the case, it is certainly no true that we cannot create from a place of abundance. Unfortunately, when we are wealthy and rich, it doesn’t seem natural for us to keep creating: it’s too hard and far easier just to enjoy our comforts. In this way, it’s perhaps “natural” for us to associate scarcity with creation, but it is not a necessarily relationship, and for this reason we should not assume that a Great Enrichment is only possible if humans see themselves as “dealing with scarcity.” We could have in the past seen ourselves as “having everything we needed” and yet still invented and created innovative solutions to our problems. Sure, we didn’t need to solve our problems (perhaps we could have managed them well enough), but we also could have solved them, and in this way Rhetoric didn’t need “a worldview of scarcity” to arise and prevail over Discourse. But as Rhetoric has weakened and Discourse grew, “the story of scarcity” seems to have gained necessity and power. After all, it becomes more necessary for us to “stimulate demand” as we lose the capacity to “create demand,” and scarcity is a powerful story to help with that effort.
What Illich seems to be saying is that people in the past did not think of water as scarce, but water as something they had to somehow get. Water was experienced as a challenge that required ability to meet, while today (to us the disabled) water is a limited resource (that always seems to be becoming scarcer, perhaps because of the system that has made us “toward” it as “scarce”). Humanity in the past did not experience that world as full of scarcity but more so full of challenges, and perhaps the movement from “challenge” to “scarcity” was needed for us to support larger populations, and that’s a fair point, but Illich wants us to realize at least that scarcity is more so “a way of seeing.” That being the case, we might negate/sublate this perspective into something else. What would it mean for us today to see water as a “challenge” again? How might that change us? It might be the same move as negate/sublating “scarcity” into “lack”…
As Heidegger speaks of technology “enframing” us and changing our “towardness” to the world — how we hermeneutically experience and interpret it — Illich is suggests “scarcity” works similarly: it is an idea which changes how we experience phenomena and the world, and now we understand water as a “limited resource” in a whole world of limited resources. And what has created this idea of scarcity is a (growing and ever-larger) system of which simultaneously disables us, and so we need that system to get what is scarce. This adds urgency to the mix, for there is a limited number of goods that I don’t have the ability to gain and get for myself, and because they are limited, they might run out before I gain them, so I better turn and “plug in” to the system. In this way, as a system grows, it simultaneously transforms the world into a place of “scarcity” while also disabling us to do anything about that scarcity: the system creates a problem that it removes our power to address. Only the system can help with what it has caused, but since we cannot think of the system as causing any trouble, the system is a blessing, and we are blessed to be able to access it (which is all we are able to do — but that’s more than enough, yes?).
Alright, that’s all well and good, but isn’t water a limited resource, actually? There does indeed seem to be a limited amount of drinking water, but then at the same time there are natural processes that recycle water (evaporation, condensation, precipitation…) — what do we mean then when we claim that “water is limited?” What about air? There are processes in nature for producing oxygen, but what about clean air? We could run out of that, yes, but not necessarily — there are ways to assure we don’t poison ourselves to death. Lumber? There are a finite number of trees on the planet, but we can always plant more. And so on — yes, there is a sense in which all finite resources are at a given moment limited, but that limit can move and adjust, a reality which the phenomenology and terminology of “scarcity” may make us “practically forget.” “Scarcity” in a sense is a reality, but it is not a hard reality: it is a problem we can address, and yet our entire socioeconomic order can be organized in a way to reinforce messaging of “things are running out,” a phenomenology which can make us more reliant on the system, worsening our disablement.
Gold and fossil fuel seems to be rightly called “limited resources,” but do we mistakenly treat all resources as equally limited? Are we “overfitting” and misapplying a description of fossil fuels too widely? Probably, and we might also make the mistake of thinking there are a limited number of computers on planet earth and at the store, and so there is a sense in which computers are “scare resources” too. But the word “scarce” seems problematic here (and note how close it is to “scar(c)e”): even the phrase “limited resource” seems preferrable in that it doesn’t so automatically stimulate a feeling of panic and concern. Sure, there are limited cars on the planet, but we can produce more, and in fact that seems to be the problem: we often seem to be overproducing goods (perhaps influenced by a notion of scarcity that leads us into subconsciously thinking that “overproduction” isn’t possible). Metaphors and language matter, and here we are increasingly seeing reason to conclude that the language of “scarce” and “scarcity” contribute to a problematic socioeconomic order and disablement of citizenry.
Again, there is truth to that idea of “limitation,” but “scarcity” sounds like something which could run out, and ironically the more disabled we are, the more perhaps trees and clean water could all be up to the system to provide; if it doesn’t, then indeed water and energy will quickly become “scarce” as it is used up and the people prove too disabled to replace what is lost. What we fear is what can come unto us, and if we fear scarcity, we can disable ourselves to the point where only the system has power which would then have the power to make “scarcity” a reality (versus just a notion or experience). In a world of “limited” things, they can become “scarce” and then no more if we lose the ability to reproduce and recycle them, which is precisely what can occur when a people are disabled. In this way, fears of scarcity can be what bring about the reality of scarcity, thus making it seem as if the fear was always wisdom.
If the Great Enrichment and Rhetoric is why systems started growing larger (consider the emergence of boredom around the eighteenth century), then paradoxically it was our enrichment which led to us seeing the world as scarce — the exactly opposite of what should be the case. As we become wealthier and better at solving our problems, water stopped being a problem we needed to solve and instead become a “limited resource.” Why? This is strange. Perhaps it is because market forces needed water to still be valuable and sellable, and it helped price water to think of it as “scarce.” Is that what it was? With the Great Enrichment, a large market become possible, and large markets like to make money, and the higher the prices the market can charge, the more money it can make. And did “the story of scarcity” help drive up prices for greater profit? Is it all about greed? Perhaps, but perhaps what politicians instead needed ways to legitimate their power, and “the story of scarcity” helped create a “perpetual crisis” (Paul Virilio) from which politicians could always garner legitimacy? Perhaps in this way both the market and the State benefit from “the story of scarcity?” Perhaps also it just seems as if resources are scarce — it stands to “low order reason” that as populations grow, resources will be harder to garner, and so a notion of “scarcity” could arise emergently that way. I’m not sure, but we can help address the question of why “the story of scarcity” and the Great Enrichment have correlated in acknowledged the odd paradox that the notion of “scarcity” arose after the Great Enrichment and enlargement of systems which then perhaps used “the story of scarcity” to legitimize their power. Hard to say.
If the Great Enrichment led to large systems, and large systems disabled us, perhaps being disabled makes the world feel limited and thus full of “scarce resources,” precisely because we cease being able to create anything — the world hence becomes one big “zero-sum game,” and indeed then resources are limited (the finite will eventually run out). Where we can only “stimulate,” not “create,” there is a real sense where things are limited, and so it makes sense why the growth of a system, as made possible by the Great Enrichment, has led to the birth of “a story of scarcity” — because of our disablement, it’s perhaps not a mere story: things now “are” scarce. Because of disablement, our “towardness” has changed, and things are indeed running out. They must where we cannot create. They must where there is only entropy, no negentropy.
Where scarcity defines our “towardness,” it is then natural to defer to a system to distribute that scarcity, to defend the scarcity we have, and to create systems of laws and enforcement to protect scarcity. Certainly, law is needed, but the more a society ceases to be creative and in need of stimulation, the more law might have to play a role (risking overreach). Furthermore, though “private property” is a necessary component of a functioning society (I would not want to go back to the ages without it), the question arises how we might be “toward” property? Is ownership a way to defend against scarcity, or do we rather designate ownership to outline which “tools” belong to who for their creative projects, whose responsible for those “tools,” and where marks the area in which a people has sovereignty to make decisions for their creative work. More could be said, but there is a radical difference between “property as a response to scarcity” and “property as designating responsibility, areas of decision-making, and areas of creation.” Without property there cannot be definition, and furthermore it’s hard to define “skin in the game”; at the same time, “private property” under Discourse and “a story of scarcity” can become frantic efforts of people “to get a piece of the pie before the pie runs out.” Property is then used not to “create demand” but as a way that we might brace ourselves when the stimulation begins to fail. Buying and keeping property becomes a means of investment and speculation, which is one of the tools we have left for market growth once all we have is stimulation. Gradually then, like “responsibility,” property can become part of the problem.
Law and property can be seen as “tools” just like a phone or car, and Illich has warned that tools tend to become problematic once we “overreach” or “over-apply” their use. Under “the story of scarcity,” this mistake might become likely, precisely because we are “toward” the world in a way that is more anxious, and when we are anxious we tend to overreact (precisely because we think it’s “better to be safe than sorry” — a problematic notion that can benefit Discourse). Speaking of Medical Nemesis, Illich argues that he was using medicine to make a broader point:
‘I didn’t write that book on medicine to speak about medicine, but to discuss the counterproductivity of commodity production after a certain level of intensity in supply is reached. I just used medicine as an illustration.’⁶⁸⁷
“The story of scarcity” seems to follow the emergence of “commodity production,” which makes sense because the very need for production is legitimated by an idea of scarcity (please note that “production” and “creation” are not necessarily similes: production can be a “shadow of its former self,” and also please note that an economy reliant on “shadow work” might be an economy that doesn’t just reduce “shadow work” to “a shadow of its former self,” but all work. “Overextend tools” become counterproductive, as do “overly large systems”: like the mistake of “autonomous rationality,” there is the mistake of “autonomous tools” or the notion that “there is no necessary limit to how much and to what degree a tool is used and/or a system grows and is applied.” It doesn’t even occur to us that this could be a problem, as it doesn’t occur to us that it is possible to overapply rationality (thus making self-effacing “autonomous rationality”). Awareness and Attention were concerns of Illich’s.
Like Alex Ebert, Illich is defending “limitation” for the sake of dynamism, and where there are limitations there are unknowns. ‘The only hope for life which I’m seeking rests upon rejection of sentimentality and openness to surprise,’ Illich once said, and indeed where we are “unlimited,” nothing can surprise us, for there is nothing which we cannot control.⁶⁸⁸ If something does surprise us, like shadow work, it can now be defined as a “deviant,” not a revelation of how life is best and should be lived. Life then becomes about “planning” to assure we aren’t surprised versus prove “prepared’ to handle surprise, and if there is something about “being human” that requires us to “prepare” versus “plan,” then we have moralized a way of life that dehumanizes and disables. This is what concerned Illich, and ultimately “the story of scarcity” can make us “toward” Plato’s Cave in a way that keeps us in it, unable to “leave our own.” This is because to be concerned with scarcity makes us constantly looking outward versus inward, when it is inward we must look to develop our own resources and cultivate “intrinsic motivation.” Looking outward, we cultivate and habituate ourselves to Discourse, which perhaps can indeed “stimulate” and “drag” us out of the Cave, but when that occurs is random, and others leave because they randomly and mysteriously determine they are in a Cave and need to leave on their own. This is very possible, and it does happen, but the point of our journey is to cease relying on “dumb luck” for this to occur, especially since not falling below the DEH and overcoming “The Meta-Crisis” seems contingent on us learning how to spread the conditions which cultivate the kinds of people who are not reliant on “bestowing” and capable of “leaving Plato’s Cave on their own.” Perhaps “dumb luck” is all we need, especially if there is something about history which brings about from “the implicit” what is needed in “the explicit” (as we discussed regarding Hegel), but again there is reason to consider this cultivation. I believe lives are better when they are “intrinsically motivated.”
If peace means boredom and disablement, and this causes a Great Stagnation which drifts below the non-self-correcting DEH, causing sociopolitical turmoil, then we should not speak of “peace as development,” only “peace as a negative space which needs sublation” (as I think we should discuss “The Meaning Crisis”). If peace is not sublated, we might speak of it as “preparation for war.” But what if we are disabled? Who could fight? Perhaps no one, just as no one could stimulate demand. We will sit in Plato’s Cave. And we will miss nothing. But we will. What is required today is a negation/sublation of the Great Enrichment, a figuring out how might the Bourgeois Virtues and Thymos exist together (as I have discussed with Owen). Cleo Kearns and I discussed how Dante must gradually ascend toward the Beatific Vision; if he ascends too quickly, he will be reduced to ash. History is easily no different, and perhaps before now was “too soon” to determine how we might “spread Childhood” and help a more “intrinsically motivated world” emerge. We should not assume that we have made a mistake to end up here. History must be processed, but now approaches a need for negation/sublation. But we must prove able for it.
If there is any “given” left, perhaps it is the “given” that we are incapable of making our own “givens.” We are disabled. We are needy. “Givens” are scarce. Yes, but “scarcity” does not need to be a prison; it can be a challenge. We face a challenge thanks to “givens.” We can do nothing. Indeed, we can do nothing. And that is the beginning, the key to understand how “scarcity” might be negated/sublated into “lack” and how “lack” might be a river-hole. Funny enough, the loss of “cultural givens” has not yet become a loss of “economic givens,” for it is still “given” that an economy is based on “the story of scarcity” and “stimulating demand.” Who could question this? Ivan Illich, and with this it is suggested that “the loss of givens” hasn’t yet been complete, that this “incompletion” is the problem.
Since writing Belonging Again (Part I), it has become clear to me that though we have suffered “the loss of givens” and that “nothing is given anymore,” there is actually a sense in which we have not yet suffered a “total loss of givens.” Ivan Illich helped me see that, and as of October 2023, it is clear I haven’t been precise enough in speaking about “the loss of givens.” No, there actually aren’t “givens” in economics (that argument has been a key point of this book), but we still certainly live “as if” there are “givens,” while in culture and society we seem to be more aware of “the loss of givens.” Gödel has reached more people on the popular level regarding the social, but Gödel has reached few in economics: “the death of God” is yet to be “the death of the market.” It is on this point that I have realized a need for nuance and clarity — I am in Illich’s debt.
“Givens” are still with us in the economic system, and as a result (to channel Alex Ebert’s important “Fre(Q) Theory”), we have not reached a “total saturation point” where absolutely nothing is “given” — this is the point where a new threshold can be crossed, for a new equilibrium is reached. We have suffered “the loss of givens” socially, but we have not suffered “the total loss of givens” yet, because there are still “givens” in economics (hence why we in this book have attempted to show that economics is “fundamentally incomplete”). If there were no “givens” at all, it wouldn’t be given that we are disabled and in need of the system. The “loss of givens” socially has simply created space for “market givens” to rush in and fill the space: everything can be priced now and marketized (as Sandel feared in What Money Can’t Buy). “Givens” are also “guards,” and since “social givens” are gone but Discourse is still in control, Discourse has simply extended “market givens” into all areas of our lives.
And shouldn’t it? I mean, we must “stimulate demand,” and the more that is done the more the market can stay alive, right? And if the market falls below the DEH, we might be doomed. It might seem obvious that the market shouldn’t infringe upon all areas of life, but do we honesty have a better idea? The stakes are incredibly high. Sure, it would be nice if “the market” and all other spheres of human life could be kept separate, but that is idealistic. We should be happy for what we have and not complain. And if ultimately the Great Stagnation does slip below the DEH, it’s better to enjoy another ten years than suffer collapse today, yes? Shouldn’t we be grateful? If we cannot “spread Childhood,” indeed, perhaps we should be.
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Notes
⁶⁷⁷Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 3.
⁶⁷⁸Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 255.
⁶⁷⁹Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 286.
⁶⁸⁰Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 287.
⁶⁸¹Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 35.
⁶⁸²Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 187.
⁶⁸³Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 25.
⁶⁸⁴Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 155.
⁶⁸⁵Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 23.
⁶⁸⁶Illich, Ivan. “The De-linking of Peace and Development.” In the Mirror of the Past. New York, NY: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1992: 19.
⁶⁸⁷Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 194.
⁶⁸⁸Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Concord, Ontario. House of Anasi Press Limited, 1992: 190.
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