The Unfreedom of Scarcity

One of the real problems of the liberal model of freedom is in situations of extreme scarcity, where there is not enough for not only everyone, but for only a few people at most.

This is most common in “lottery” professions, where a few very successful people present the face of the profession, and the vast majority are exploited and holding out for their one shot at greatness. So we’re talking Academia, Startups, Acting, Professional Sports, Publishing, Politics… really way too many fields that define success in our world.

Only some people can make it. To some degree this will be determined by merit, but luck and networking play a very large role in that. Ask anyone in that field and getting a mentor is a HUGE HUGE deal (okay I don’t know much about pro sports, but I know people in every one of the other listed fields.) To go from toiling in obscurity and starving to “this one person you respect actually likes your work and wants to help you” is the biggest relief you can imagine.

And the mentor, or any networking connection like that, really does help. They introduce you to people who can help your career get started a little, who are happy to help you if it means impressing Big Name Mentor. It makes you feel like you actually have a shot to prove yourself, and it can not be underestimated how psychically valuable this is.

It’s kind of nice, sure, but it exists entirely outside formal ethical networks and so there is nothing obligatory about it. A mentor has the right to be friends with whoever they want, and to introduce their friends to whoever they want, and they haven’t crossed any moral lines. And they have the freedom to NOT be friends and not introduce you around as well.

You can see where the power dynamics of this go.

If you displease your mentor in any way whatsoever your ladder out of the abyss will just curl up and disappear. If you disagree politically with your mentor, they may not introduce you to that photographer. If you stop laughing at their boring jokes, they may not use their leverage to get you that internship. If you don’t sleep with your mentor, they may stop returning your calls (and soon everyone else will too.)

And this can all happen without any malice! To the famous mentor, you were a fun person to pal around with, things cooled down, and they’re moving on with their life. What’s wrong with that? In fact if you were to criticize their behavior, you’d be criticizing their liberal freedom to do whatever they want so long as “their fist doesn’t reach someone else’s face.” You’d be putting some sort of unasked for moral obligation on them. (Ew.)

But losing them means giving up on your dreams, just as they are in sight. Hell, it means finding an entirely new professional identity to base the rest of your lifepath on.

So instead you know you have to keep the mentor interested in you. What was initially a fun flirtation with someone impressively accomplished (and success is HOT in any field) can evolve into unending attempts to keep them “interested” in you, and the sort of joyless, obligatory sex no one benefits from. Or an unwillingness to even consider political points of view that may be uncool to the people you are trying to impress.

This is where the sex scandals in a lot of the lottery professions seem to come from (start with Bill Cosby and google any of the above fields.) It’s not superiors saying “sleep with me or else”, but famous people assuming all the young hot things want to sleep with them, and the young exploited proles going along with it until things have gone so far they explode from the tensions (which are complete surprises to the increasingly dense mentors, who don’t think there’s anything wrong with all the people desperate for their approval.)

And I think these scandals are just the tip of the iceberg, the rare cases where someone is so hurt by the affair that they go public and potentially give up any career in that field. Much more often is the case when the junior person goes along with it, gets in too deep, has a shitty few months of feeling used, and then pulls away or is kicked away, to a diminished future. (Of course, this pattern probably plays out often with every party feeling satisfied afterwards as well.)

Like this sort of power imbalance is just unhealthy and wrong. Marx wrote that no one is free when they are hungry, and I don’t think that just means “hunger is really bad” but that “people will do anything, give up anything when they are truly desperate.” They’ll give up their sexuality, their political independence, their dignity, anything to just get a bit of hope - and no one has to force it away from them, people do it wholly willingly under extreme scarcity. So what does free speech, or consent, or private property even mean in such situations?

(Even the masters are fucked over, because it’s impossible for them to have equal, healthy relations under a system of oppression. Imagine not being able to be friends with anyone because you don’t know if their laughter at your jokes is ever genuine? So they become emotional idiots who have to convince themselves that no one needs them that much and no one is trying to use them, exploding at the slightest narcissistic injury to this illusion.)

You can’t just make up a bunch of rights that people have protecting them, when there’s a power structure that asks people to give up anything for just a bit of hope. Class power analysis matters, or else you just end up like the Hollywood dating scene.

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@balioc

This seems correct.

And very very very hard to solve, from a cultural-engineering perspective, short of sledgehammer solutions like “we are going to clamp down on technology so hard that no one knows anyone outside his own little hunter-gatherer tribe.” You can redistribute resources all you want, you can work your ass off to make the masses more materially secure…but it’s not like people are desperate to break into movies or publishing for the material security. So long as there are large human networks, there are going to be implicit social hierarchies, with the concomitant incentives to rise. That’s pretty damn fundamental.

…I guess there are a lot of proposed solutions that amount to “make people more enlightened so that they don’t feel the urge to climb.” I tend to be skeptical that anything in this vein is at all plausible.

And then there’s my pet “solution,” which involves reconstructing such urges (rather than eliminating them) so that they can be more easily satisfied by low-level personal interactions. But even to my fond eyes that’s obviously going to work only to some extent, some of the time.

Bluh. I dunno. This is hard, man. Let’s go shopping.

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It is hard, but I’m not aiming to *fix all these systems now.* More, our knowledge of that dynamic should affect our understanding of the phenomenon around it. For instance. 1. This is a reason to be very leery of extreme inequality. Even when the baseline material well being of the exploited class isn’t that bad (say, computer programmers looking at startups), the social dynamics between extreme havenots and them is still inimical to human well being. Which is why a period of widening inequality is going to lead to people “voluntarily” giving up their rights more and more just to get a shot at getting ahead, and render liberalism meaningless if it goes too far. 2. When considering creating or joining a lottery profession, this should be a cost you are aware of. Tech geeks tend to celebrate Silicon Valley and its superstars, and want it to have a more prominent place in America’s culture, but there’s really a lot of toxic exploitation that is inevitable under it. And you may think going into academia or hollywood is at worse, a gamble you might lose - but it can be even worse than that, where it’s several years where you have every incentive to sell your dignity to get ahead. (The namesake TV show, Silicon Valley, actually offers wonderful illustrations of this phenomenon.) 3. These are systemic problems, not personal moral ones. Whenever we see an explosive scandal of some high-powered mentor sleeping with/stealing from/exploiting some ingenue, the story is usually the same:

“the mentor had idea this was going so badly, and thought themselves “one of the good ones” because they certainly never threatened the ingenue in order to get them to do whatever. In fact, the ingenue came onto them, so it’s all a horrible misunderstanding. Yeah it got kind of pressurey or stalky towards the end, but what relationship doesn’t? It started so innocent, etc etc.”

These mentors aren’t lying, they really believe it, it’s just they were in a system where people felt making them happy was required for career success, and the mentor blithely went along with it. We must resist the temptation to cleanse the field of One Perverted Dude, and to look at all the systemic contributions. And if you think people having sex they don’t fully want, or falling into line politically when they have doubts, are really that bad, then yes you should want to smash the whole system with a sledgehammer. I’d love to see all our modern liberal culture’s rage about sexual exploitation aimed at Hollywood and to just wreck it until they can build some other more egalitarian system. Maybe that’s not realistic, but it still means we are making a choice that we tolerate that exploitation if it gives us a film industry. We are complicit - don’t push this all on the one idiot you caught today. (My frustration with most social justice causes is not that they go too far, but that they don’t go far enough whenever it comes to eliminating the systemic causes of most of the evils they rightly see. They burn a few witches then forget the problem.) 4. The thing the idiots who get caught are guilty of is ignoring power dynamics. Don’t sleep with someone you have a lot of power over. Don’t expect them to be your bosom friend, or turn to them for political agreement. You may not think you are coaxing them, but at some point they don’t have a choice even if they wanted to. Consent is the beginning of sexual ethics, not the end of them. 5. Full communism, etc, not just in money but in social status, so that we know people who are interacting with us are doing so genuinely out of their care for and enjoyment of us.