When the costs outweigh the benefits...

"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to
be better than yourself."

- William Faulkner.





Ambition is the driving force behind progression. Is that why we call those people that are attempting to create change "ambitious"? As an economist, I can tell you that one of the basic principles is that people respond to incentives. That is, people take actions based upon rational analysis, if the benefits outweigh the costs (an incentive) one will take an action, if the costs outweigh the benefits (a disincentive) one would not take the action.

Taking this assumption as given, I contend that people only value positive change highly if it is efficiently achievable. This is easily demonstrated using proof through analogy. A firm (pharmaceutical in this example) will only continue to research a cure for a disease if it can cover its costs with the future revenue, and still profit. Sadly, in the case of very rare diseases where there is little demand, this is not always feasible.

At this point, I will attempt to define two distinct types of progress.

• The first is societal progression. New technology, cultural & religious progression, etc. This type of progression applies to the population at large. I don't necessarily mean the world here, nor do I believe that a society is defined by borders. What I mean is a group of people united by a common interest (or, if you agree with my last post, a group divided from the population by a differing interest) whether that be a nation, a culture, or a population matters little to my argument.

• The second is individual progression. Fame, fortune, prestige, etc. Perhaps one could even construe spiritual journeys as an individual progression. Anything for personal (or familial) gain.

As an addendum to this distinction, oftentimes the two overlap one another, for example, one may be recognized for being a proponent of societal progression and thereby achieve individual progression. We can categorize this example as a causal relationship, but in other cases there still may be some correlation. (A feeling of self-fulfillment even if no recognition is offered, etc) I don't wish to investigate the psychology behind the subject.

My argument is that our drive to succeed, our "ambition", is often misplaced. Of all the people on the planet, only a few will change society in any manner, and of those few, a minority will actually have an affect upon our lives. So many young individuals are seen as bright and ambitious, ready to tackle the problems of the future...youth has a tendency to cloud people's judgments. We overestimate our abilities, underestimate the barriers.

My question, I guess, is what happens to the people who have the power and drive to succeed, but still don't? Maybe they're in need for a reevaluation of the costs and benefits of their attempts to create progress, or maybe there's a hidden element at play here. Maybe luck would have it that they don't succeed, regardless of their talents, strengths. Give me some input.

Maybe we just need to change our oh-so-prevalent values. Maybe progress isn't really so great?

Solitude is impractical yet society is fatal.

"My candle burns at both its ends;
It will not last the night;
But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light."

----Edna St. Vincent Millay

So I gave up blogging a while ago in the hopes of perhaps ridding myself of the habit of expressing my own ohsoprevalent 'teen angst' in writing...Clearly, the creation of this blog shows the sucess (or, failure, perhaps?) of my efforts. My hope, then, is that instead of my last blog, that detailed the enduring instances of my life, this one will be filled with wisdom and insight.

So, the topic of my writings today is society. Generally, when one thinks of society people think of a somewhat national society (or perhaps in this era, a global one). Really, a society, in the eyes of the dictionary, is any group of individuals that share some common interest, whether it be cultural, religious, patriotic, etc. But is this truly the defining aspect of a society?

A lot of my good friends are democrats, but even within these so called 'democrats', there are a lot of different issues on stances. This schism is clearly enunciated by the results of the current primary, the democrats are virtually split between Obama and Clinton with supporters of each candidate vehementally protesting the other's viability as a candidate at the slightest sign of weakness. Why, just last night, as a few friends and I were watching the news together, a graph was displayed showing the percentage of African American voters voting for Obama in his latest victory in the state of Mississippi. My good friend Matt responded to this by posing a similar question, that is, what is the percentage of female voters voting for Hillary in the election. My friend immediately responded to this question (quite flippantly, I might add) she said, (and I'm paraphrasing here), "That's not the same thing, I don't think any self-respecting intelligent woman would vote for Hillary." Now, as someone who has contemplated voting for Hillary on a few occasions, I was, of course, offended by her statement

As I explain the story now, however, I find it elucidates the view of society I am attempting to explain here. We define ourselves more by divisions than any unity. The typical indict to this argument is that my story, or any, for that matter, is simply based on too small a scope to really be able to make a conclusion about the way people identify themselves. However, using the same analogy of a political society, I posit the following case: most people would consider the democratic party a society. Given that the democratic party is a societ, why, then in the aforementioned case, is it self divided? What is it that keeps the democratic society unified? The existence of an 'other', in this case, the Republican Party. Even the wishy-washy democrats I know, the ones who know nothing about politics, have one thing in common. A high level of disdain for the Republican party.

Giorgio Agamben (a prominent philosopher) writes about this exact phenomenon, he argues that political sovereignty (note: when I am talking about society, I am mainly talking about this same concept, Agamben simply uses different rhetoric to describe the same phenomenon) is not grounded in the community, nor the people. In essence, power is the ability to declare the state of exception. (That is, to identify an other that is excluded from the community.) This power therefore constitutes the ‘paradigm of government. This can be verified factually with the historical tendency of liberal democracies to rely more and more on the subjection of the legislative to the executive, through procedures akin to the logic of emergency. It can be further evidenced by any such number of narratives as the one I have described. What makes us Americans? We're American when we're 'not' something else.

Conceived as exception rather than as democratic procedure, sovereignty operates under the logic of the ‘ban’, that is to say, it is at bottom a form of inclusion in the social order through exclusion, or an exclusion that maintains within the order. That is, instead of society's interests colluding because of some unified desire, society's interests converge because of the vast differences with another society, the society of the 'other'. Since the essence of the political is exception, inclusion through exclusion, and law is the expression of political sovereignty, rather than giving rise to a normative sphere from which to articulate normativity and facticity, the law is itself indistinguishable from pure factuality, and the ultimate form of the law is brute force. The State is not the institution safeguarding and enforcing democratically constituted laws, but is the enforcement of legal violence and division.

It is this very mentality that justifies the oppression of the 'other', of the 'exception'. Genocides were always justified by placing doubt on the very humanity of the victims, equating them to animals, and distinguishing them from the 'society'. On a much smaller level, many of my friends (democrats) consider republicans beneath them. One, in fact, has a sticker that says "a country of oppression" with the symbol of the Republican party on it. A country of oppression because of the Republicans? No, the oppression comes from the state of exception.

Ever had those friends who you don't really get along with, but you can talk to for hours regarding the ongoings of other people? That's another state of exception. You're not friends with the person because you like them, because you share some common interests, you're friends because you both hate the jerk standing next to you.

Society isn't about what unifies us, it's about what divides us.

Also, note, I didn't think of that title by myself, it's a quote by Emerson.