Episode 205 - Transcript

So last episode was all about the importance of participating in a democracy, taking responsibility, HAVING the sometimes tough conversations with each other, that eventually make up the NORMS of the societies we live in. 

And if you wanted an EXAMPLE of ONE of these norms, a social IDEAL, that Sandel thinks we’d benefit a LOT from if we talked about it more…how about an ideal that drives the way we think about a LOT of things in western culture…that WHAT we should be aiming for…is a society based on the concept of a meritocracy. Or a system…where the REWARDS of a society… are distributed based on who is the most talented, who works the hardest and who’s the most qualified for the job. In a true meritocracy you could say…talented, hardworking, QUALIFIED people, are the ones who would BE the most socially rewarded. 

Everybody knows this is a common way that people WISH our societies could be set up…and Sandel in his 2020 book called the Tyranny of Merit…is going to QUESTION whether that’s ACTUALLY a good way to be giving recognition in a society. And before we get into his CRITIQUE…ONE thing needs to be acknowledged here right at the start. 

Well, I guess a QUESTION that NEEDS to be asked here…is why would ANYBODY…want to do it in a different way? Why would ANYBODY want the INCENTIVES of their society, set up in ANY way that DOESN’T primarily reward these people? 

I mean when I need a heart surgery…I want the best possible surgeon you can find…I don’t want some dude that…you know seen every episode of Grey’s Anatomy or MASH. As Sandel says: when you’re on a flight…you want the PILOT…that’s the MOST QUALIFIED to be flying the plane…I mean seriously…what else are people REALLY even making a CASE for here?

We DON’T want a society…where people are incentivized to sit on the couch all day, complain, and then expect to get the exact same outcomes as everyone else. NOBODY…wants a society like that.

We NEED people doing great things. EVERYBODY benefits when people provide value to the world. And we WANT things to be SET UP in a way where the people that WORK hard are REWARDED over the people that didn’t apply themselves. We want a situation where if somebody is the best for the job…THEY get the job, THEY get the social recognition…and are not HELD BACK by some IMMUTABLE thing that they happened to be BORN with.

I mean we’ve SEEN, Nepotism and prejudice be the SELECTION method throughout history…what society DOESN’T want to do AWAY with all that… and PAVE the WAY as much as we CAN for the people with the most merit…to rise to the top?

And I think if we’re able to ACKNOWLEDGE all these points… as a PLACE to START– you know plant a flag in the ground right here… then I think we can open ourselves up to the REST of the discussion, few more LAYERS to it… that Michael Sandel wants to turn us ON to today. 

What HE wants to ask is: DOES us setting things up to be, a meritocracy as MUCH as we can…COME with certain UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES that we can SEE in the world all around us…but that we often don’t ATTRIBUTE to…the meritocracy? 

Again, BUILDING off the ideas from last episode: if we WANT to take RESPONSIBILITY for the norms and ideals that we organize society around and then DO THE WORK EVERYDAY to ENGAGE with them…then the idea of meritocracy… NEEDS to be something that we take a closer look at for Michael Sandel.

And there’s TWO PROBLEMS, he thinks…with the theoretical idea of our meritocracy. Number ONE he says is that we just don’t actually ACHIEVE it… in practice.

This is important, but it’s ALSO something everybody listening to this has heard, no less than 800 times before in their lives. For example: Sandel talks about how 50% of people that go to ivy league schools are from the top 1% of families in terms of income. That’s the fact that HE gives here… but it doesn’t need to be THIS fact. You don’t like THAT one…Just enter in ANY statistic you WANT that’s more persuasive to YOU…that certain people, get certain privileges simply because of something about how they are born. PLENTY of examples of that NO MATTER what your politics is. Point is to him: problem number ONE with the meritocracy is that we don’t actually achieve the meritocracy.

Problem number TWO…which I think is far more PHILOSOPHICALLY interesting…is that he says EVEN if we could start PROVIDING…a perfect, meritocracy and remove ALL the barriers out of people’s WAY…that would STILL be, a VERY FLAWED way to be STRUCTURING society…that is filled with ALL sorts of bad results for the people that live IN that society.

In fact the person that originally COINED the term meritocracy… was a guy named Michael Young back in the year 1958. He wrote a book called the Rise of the Meritocracy…it’s a FICTION novel, that’s about a dystopian future…where a society, organizes things around a meritocracy…and then in the year 2034 in the book… there’s a violent, populist uprising of the CITIZENS that feel BETRAYED by the LEADERS of the society that they’re a part of.

And it’s funny you can hear that and be like oh my GOD…what’s gonna go wrong? What could be WRONG with a society based on merit? Well Michael Young SAW the problems that Sandel thinks are playing out in the REAL world all around us. 

See FANS of a meritocracy will say… that one of the STRENGTHS of it is that it’s a situation where everybody gets, EXACTLY what they deserve. And then maybe more importantly…everybody FEELS like they GOT exactly what they deserved. So one VERSION of that is that a young, smart, healthy, talented, hard working, MOTIVATED person will DO great things… and society will benefit from their work…and they will be COMPENSATED well for doing those things…everyone will give them a ton of social recognition, and these SUCCESSFUL people will FEEL…like EVERYTHING that they GOT in life…is something that they DESERVE. I worked hard, I was smart. I DESERVE all of these things that I have… because it was ME DOING THINGS that GOT them.

But the FLIP side of that Sandel says is that in OTHER cases where TONS of people are struggling… for WHATEVER reason they might be struggling…THOSE PEOPLE in this method of determining social VALUE…are ALSO left to feel…like they got EXACTLY what they deserved. Which would be FINE if individual effort and talent were the ONLY factors that determined whether somebody was doing GOOD or not…but unfortunately in the world we live in… there’s a lot of OTHER factors that just, fall outside of the control…of what a single person can wake up and have an EFFECT on with their daily effort.

For the sake of an example that I think Sandel wouldn’t object to here. Take the difference between income levels relative to cost of living between the year 1980 and 2024. This 44 year time span by the way that no DOUBT will go down in history as a pretty unique period of change. 

By the way heads up I originally SAW this example a few weeks ago on a random YouTube short, it was one of those big channels that compare cost of living, wish I subscribed to more channels so I could find the exact video, but I thought it was a good comparison of pre and post neoliberalism. 

In 1980, in the United States where I live for example, federal minimum wage was at $3.10 per hour, the average apartment rental back then was between $250 - $300 per month. Which means if you worked 40 hours a week for four weeks your take home pay would be $496. Which means your apartment rental, if it was $250 per month would be ABOUT 50% of your pay…again if you were someone making minimum wage back in 1980. 

Fast forward to 2024, PAST this period of neoliberal, get the government out of the way, globalized market fundamentalism… and the federal minimum wage today… is $7.25… with the average apartment cost being $1713 a month. Now if you work 40 hours a week at $7.25… ALL the money you MAKE in a month, if you DIDN’T EAT or do ANYTHING ELSE, ALL of it, wouldn’t be enough to afford an APARTMENT. So then you consider states like Washington that have mandated a minimum wage increase to $15 an hour a few years ago and it’s gonna be rising until 2020. That’s nice of them. And you’ll HEAR people that are a little OLDER that USED to make $20 an hour back in 2003, and they’ll hear that and go man I can’t BELIEVE, the kind of money these delivery drivers are expecting to get paid. What are they driving a lamborghini as they pick up my loaded baked potato fries? At least they’ll be WARM when they get here. 

$15 an hour 40 hours a week makes your take home at the end of the month $2400 before taxes. Compare that to the $1713 that you need to get an apartment…and that would be 71% of your monthly income. So then you say come on though…who can REALLY expect to be able to rent an APARTMENT SIMPLY with a minimum wage job ANYWAY…shelter is a privilege…well let’s look at college graduates…out of school they start out averaging $24 per hour. Which makes your monthly take home around $3800 a month before taxes… compare that to the 1713 cost of an apartment would be 45% of your monthly income. A college graduate today…has a 5% better situation…than the person making the FEDERAL minimum WAGE did back in 1980. 

Hopefully the intent here is clear…it’s not to say that there are no other FACTORS to these NUMBERS here…the POINT is to illustrate how there are things OTHER than INDIVIDUAL EFFORT…that DETERMINE whether someone’s STRUGGLING or not. And they are things that individuals… have NO CONTROL over: macroeconomic factors like inflation, wage stagnation, jobs being sent elsewhere, growing inequality in general. There’s HISTORICAL factors too…like the EVENTS of the WORLD, that DICTATE many of the opportunities and challenges that YOUR specific generation will have to deal with. 

More than THAT…there’s the way that YOUR particular historical moment…is going to PRIORITIZE your skills. Like if you’re a person listening to this and you have a really high IQ and you get paid a lot because you HAVE a job that REQUIRES a high IQ and you’ve found a way within this current setup to make that happen…YES, you have a skill that is highly VALUED, in THIS world, right now…but you also know at ANOTHER level… that if you were born into a DIFFERENT society 1000 years ago…you’d likely just be the highest IQ person…pushing a plow…you know looking for pattern recognition in how your pet cockroach moves around in the box you keep ‘em in. 

See from macro economics, to HISTORICAL factors, to even BIOLOGICAL facts about a person…these things ALL play an undeniable ROLE in how someone may be STRUGGLING in life. And when you IGNORE the importance of these in determining where people end up…and you replace it INSTEAD with an attitude towards people that everybody is getting exactly what they deserve…all SORTS of ways of thinking about things stem OUT of this that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. 

For example in this meritocratic setup as he calls it…to Michael Sandel: people are more SKEPTICAL towards public assistance as a thing we need to provide. After all if the REASON you can’t afford your own house is because you’re a loser who made bad decisions getting the wrong degree…or isn’t side hustling enough to make more money…then why do MY tax dollars gotta pay to fix your situation? YOU go out and fix it. 

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ANOTHER thing this leads to he thinks is a situation…where our society FLATTERS the successful people…and humiliates the unsuccessful. Again because it tells SUCCESSFUL people YOU’RE the REASON for all your success, you don’t have to CONSIDER all the factors OUTSIDE of your control that make your situation a pretty fortunate one…and then again for the UNSUCCESSFUL, YOU TOO are the reason for your lack of success…and you shouldn’t be sitting around complaining about these OUTSIDE factors…NOBODY CARES…nobody needs to come and RESCUE you, just work harder and OVERCOME these things like everyone else does. 

In other words: this is an attitude towards each other…that is CORROSIVE to a society. In fact MORE than that to Michael Sandel…it’s corrosive to the common good and what we talked about last episode: our ability to have the conversations that are going MAKE our society into something that we all want to LIVE in. It’s corrosive in a FEW different ways. One…it makes it so we DON’T focus on the BAD economic policy… that GOT us into the situation we’re in if people ARE struggling. 

When we FAIL to have substantive conversations about how politicians and economists made HUGE MISTAKES a couple decades ago that have LED to this place. And instead we just blame the people who are struggling for not WORKING hard enough. ALL THAT DOES is LEAVE these people in a place where they become humiliated and resentful…because from THEIR perspective ALL THEY’VE done is go to school, get a degree and do everything society TOLD them to do…you know, they FOLLOWED the RECIPE…and now they’re being told they can’t afford to function in the world, what because they lack the will power to start a side hustle? In what little time they have off?

IS THAT…the KIND of SOCIETY that we would collectively DESIGN…if we were DRAWING IT UP in a brainstorming session? I think MOST people would say no. And Michael Sandel says this anger and resentment from the people being SENT this message that THEY’RE the PROBLEM when it comes to why their LIFE has gotten WORSE in recent years…Make no mistake…this ANGER is what has CREATED…the recent rise of POPULISM all across the political landscape in the last ten years or so. 

See if populism is a usually grassroots political movement… that is centered around a distaste for some ELITE GROUP who people generally think are hurting them in some way…then as we talked about in one of the Zizek episodes: big pieces of BOTH the modern left AND the right would have to say that THAT’S a pretty accurate DESCRIPTION of them. 

And the meritocratic ways of thinking that PRODUCE this resentment where people FEEL as though ELITES are out of touch and don’t APPRECIATE anything that they PROVIDE to the world…this ALLOWS for populist candidates to swoop in, and take ADVANTAGE of this resentment, by promising that everything you’re upset about with the ELITES, well I’m not one of them…I’m gonna fix everything by getting RID of them! 

As a quick detour here: it’s interesting to consider where Sandel says all this COMES from in the history of philosophy. As HE puts it…where did this idea that MERIT is connected to DESERVEDNESS, even COME from? 

And he says interestingly in the WESTERN world the specific way that we think about it MAY come ORIGINALLY from conversations we used to have about God and salvation. The quick version of it is that there used to be a problem in the philosophy being done around Christianity where the question was: DO I GO TO HEAVEN…if I’m a good person? You know if I perform the sacraments and do good deeds 12 hail marys 400 lord’s prayers…do people that do GOOD things go to heaven and people that do BAD things go to hell…OR…does God have the ability to let me into heaven…whether I do ANY of this stuff or not?

It may seem like a weird question…but it actually has pretty big implications for people who are Christians. And if you’re NOT Christian don’t worry about it just treat it like it's the trolley car problem. 

Because when Augustine thought about this problem…if getting into heaven REQUIRES that you’ve done certain good things…then in ONE sense God can not be omnipotent…because if you HAVEN’T done any of this GOOD stuff… then in THAT case his hands are essentially tied. I wish I COULD let ya into heaven but you haven’t done your lord’s prayers. 

Doesn’t seem LIKELY that’s the case to Augustine, MORE than that though he thinks it can’t be the case…because if it were…then he says the whole thing…about sacrificing his one and only son to FORGIVE people of their SINS…that whole thing would be completely unnecessary, you wouldn’t NEED it if you could just LIVE your life as a good person and get into heaven. 

On the OTHER hand though…if GOD can just let you in REGARDLESS of whether you’re a good person or not…then do we even DO… good things with our TIME here? I mean, sure it’d be NICE if you did…if it’s something that makes you HAPPY… but do you really NEED to DO good things in order to get into heaven?

So the implications of this are HUGE for Christian thought at the time and the FURTHER thing to CONSIDER about this conversation if you’re Michael Sandel…is that DEPENDING on which POSITION you take in this debate… that will DETERMINE a DIRECTION that your thinking starts to steer into. 

For example if you take the line that you need to BE a good person to get into heaven, and that BAD people go to hell…then Salvation…as Sandel puts it…becomes a BIT like self-help. Where as LONG as you LIVE as a good religious follower…then you can feel a sense of PRIDE…about the good DEEDS you’ve embarked on that have earned you that place in heaven, you can look DOWN on the people who were bad. 

But IF you believe that it was God’s sacrifice of his son JESUS that gets you into heaven…then the ALTERNATIVE way to feel about it… is a sense of HUMILITY towards God’s grace. Again DEPENDING on what your answer to this QUESTION is: you’ll either feel PRIDE for your own good deeds…or HUMILITY in the presence of God’s grace. 

And HERE’S the point: We LIVE for Michael Sandel in a dialectic between PRIDE on the one hand…and Humility on the other. And we live in an AGE where PRIDE…is OVERREPRESENTED in our political, economic and civil relationships. And it ORIGINATED in the HISTORY of our thinking from the results of THESE sorts of conversations. 

Because if you transpose this point about salvation to our conversation about the meritocracy…the idea that you’ve DONE good things, so you DESERVE your good PLACE in the world…and people who HAVEN’T done good things haven’t EARNED a good place in the world and need to do better…well you can SEE the direct parallel Sandel is talking about there. 

On the OTHER side of this TOO you can see how the acknowledgement of outside FORCES that you as an individual REALLY have no control over… acknowledging how MUCH those have played IN to the exact spot that you’re AT in life…THAT’S a type of HUMILITY… that people who are doing WELL in the world and think it’s ALL because of THEM… might BENEFIT from EXPLORING a bit more in their worldview. 

So to TIE the FIRST part of Sandel’s points together here and put it into the neat single sentence version of this: its NOT… that a meritocracy is bad… because we shouldn't be compensating people or appreciating them if they do something valuable…meritocratic thinking OVER INDEXES the way people LOOK at the world on the PRIDE end…of this PRIDE vs HUMILITY dialectic. 

And to Michael Sandel, that is CORROSIVE to society and the common good. As you’ll SEE throughout the rest of the EPISODE here…there are SO many EXAMPLES of the CORRECTIONS he thinks we should be making…that are going to be CENTERED around the MAIN civic virtue that he thinks we’re in DIRE NEED of in the western world right now: and that is… more HUMILITY.

Michael Sandel has said that the BIGGEST inequality that exists between people today…is NOT when it comes to PURCHASING power. Although that’s IMPORTANT…don’t get him wrong…but he’d say the BIGGER inequality that people face…is the one of social recognition…or social esteem. 

It’s WORTH asking the question…if we’re going to EXAMINE the norms that make UP the society we’re a part of: what is it that MAKES someone VALUABLE to the society that they’re in? What COUNTS as a valuable CONTRIBUTION…that we should feel INSTANT RESPECT for when we HEAR that someone is DOING it?

With the way that we CURRENTLY look at the world…people usually feel this way about Doctors…about Scientists…maybe about Judges. But OBVIOUSLY we have respect for MORE than just these careers, so WHAT IS IT that WARRANTS this social recognition more GENERALLY. 

Well to Michael Sandel…we HAVE this sort of DEFAULT RESPECT for people…when they’ve gone to SCHOOL and spent years of their life, to get a degree, or more accurately: we have RESPECT for someone’s CAREER when they are well credentialed at what they do. I mean THESE are the kind of people who you go to a party and you hear about what they DO and you’re like WOW, WOW…you really are DOING something IMPORTANT with your work…not like ME I’m just one of those delivery drivers making $15 an hour.

But IS THIS… level of RESPECT of someone SIMPLY for having a college degree hanging on the wall…is that something that’s well deserved? There’s NOT an easy yes or NO to this question which is WHY it’s something we gotta examine DEEPER. 

Michael Sandel would say that one of the reasons we SEE people with college degrees in this way…is because of the messaging we’ve been RECEIVING from a MERITOCRATIC CULTURE…for the last three and a half DECADES of our LIVES. 

Bill CLINTON he says WAY back in the 90’s told everyone…that WHAT you EARN…will depend on what you LEARN. This was the TAGLINE back in the 90s. Actually one of Clinton’s chief ADVISORS Dr. Seuss. came up with it. You know that guy wasn’t really a doctor? And to Sandel’s point WHY would he SAY that he was a doctor when he wasn’t? Well it was BECAUSE of this unquestionable recognition that we give to people that are credentialed. But in all seriousness: back in the 90’s this was the TAGLINE and for Michael Sandel what this WAS… was a meritocratic WORKAROUND… of the situation we talked about before.

Where BAD economic policy, produces uncertain economic times for people. And instead of dealing with that directly, as a WAY to SAFEGUARD AGAINST it…politicians, teachers, parents, everybody TOLD EVERYBODY…that if you want to MAKE it in the world…what you DO is you go to school, you get CREDENTIALED, you make your resume into something that when people look at it they just have a CORONARY. 

In other words to Michael Sandel…becoming a valuable member of society…has become essentially to go to a college, and get a certificate to hang on your wall that arms you to engage in what he calls meritocratic warfare. 

But NOT only…is it NOT the case anymore that you go to school and get a degree and you’re set for life in whatever field you got the degree in…but this WHOLE MESSAGE that we send to people en masse, what he calls the rhetoric of RISING…it comes with certain unintended consequences as well. 

We start to view the ENTIRE CONCEPT of EDUCATION in our societies…as just a way for people to acquire CREDENTIALS…so they can get PAID in the world. Economic JUSTICE then becomes about making sure there are no BARRIERS in the way of people being able to GET the credentials…to enter into this LIFETIME of meritocratic WARFARE with each other. 

With the SHEER NUMBERS of people that are GOING to college, and the INSTANT judgment you get if you say you’re NOT gonna go to college…the whole thing starts to feel NOT like EDUCATION anymore…but MORE like a private industry that’s been HEAVILY subsidized by government funding and political propaganda for the last 35 years. 

Now NONE of this is to say that college isn’t important to Sandel…it is. ESPECIALLY if you want to get into HIGHLY specialized FIELDS. And to him…we would do WELL as a society to make COLLEGE as accessible as POSSIBLE for the people that want to go. But that is a VERY DIFFERENT situation…than what we are currently DOING. We are CURRENTLY in the United States spending 162 BILLION dollars a year of taxpayer dollars to send people to college. And only 1 billion dollars a year to help people go to trade school. 162 to 1. What is the MESSAGE we are SENDING about what a valuable contribution to society is? 

It’s no WONDER why everybody knows what I’m talking about when I say that we have a SPECIAL level of DEFAULT respect for people with credentials. It’s no WONDER people that DO the jobs that keep the world running often don’t feel APPRECIATED by the society they’re in. It’s no wonder why in Michael Young’s book about the dystopian future of the society built on meritocracy…why there was a populist UPRISING in 2034 where people felt like CERTAIN types of work and intelligence were being VALORIZED in a way that made them feel like the ELITES of their society barely even CARED about their existence.  

So the TAKEAWAY from this…is that EDUCATION… becomes one of the UNEXPECTED CASUALTIES of the meritocracy for Michael Sandel. He thinks collectively… it would be good to RETHINK the way we see education, from the GROUND UP…maybe to REFORM it in a way, where instead of it being focused on giving people credentials…maybe we focus MORE on producing the TYPES of people we need to MAINTAIN a society that can solve its own problems: we need better education about civic virtue, we need better teaching of how to ENGAGE in a REAL way with the issues of your day, we need to teach a type of practical wisdom that is invaluable for being able to manage families and communities, and we ALSO need to make education something that TEACHES our future citizens… how to LOVE the process of learning. Not just to LEARN this thing TODAY…so that you’ll maybe get a promotion TOMORROW. THESE are the things that are MISSING from our education system…and in keeping with our conversation from last episode it is OUR JOB to MAKE these things a priority moving forward.

But how am I…supposed to CHANGE the EDUCATION system Michael Sandel? Am I supposed to take over the classrooms and start screaming at all the children? You all need more PRACTICAL wisdom in your life! Well, no the answer is through VOTING. Which, DIRECTLY connects to ANOTHER unexpected casualty of the meritocracy if you’re Michael Sandel: that is…the way we see the people that REPRESENT us…in government. 

To put it briefly…when you look at the numbers…we are EXTREMELY biased towards ELECTING people…that have these special CREDENTIALS hanging on the wall. I mean can you imagine voting for a president or a prime minister or a city council member… that didn’t even graduate college? On ONE hand it would seem RIDICULOUS to DO that…but on the OTHER hand: KNOWING that a LOT of people’s COLLEGE EXPERIENCE HASN’T exactly been focused on the purest form of education for the last 40 years…and thinking about whether a president or a prime minister, ONCE they’re elected, are they REALLY solving some problem that’s going on in a community by pulling something out of POLITICAL SCIENCE class from 25 years ago? No. What skills are they using to get the JOB done there? Well LIKELY to Sandel the kind of civic virtue, practical wisdom and leadership that we should be TEACHING kids more in school. 

In other words: it’s not the DEGREE hanging on the wall. And until we STOP ELECTING people simply because they can recite platitudes about the economy while handing out photocopies of their resume…we will NEVER get to a place where we move BEYOND the meritocratic thinking that has LED us to the place we’re in. 

This IDEA that you’re not WORTHY of RESPECT or that your job is not that important if you don’t have a degree…this has to go, for Michael Sandel. One it's just not true…two again if you were EXAMINING the social norms of your society and TENDING to the CARE of the society you live in…it’s a HORRIBLE social norm to have that does NOTHING but make MOST PEOPLE that do MOST JOBS…feel unimportant. It’s toxic to the way we SEE each other. In fact Sandel thinks that in HIS country of the United States… what the Democratic party USED to represent was the life of working class people. But now BOTH parties he says have bought into this meritocratic NONSENSE that MAKES them parties of elitist thinking, where you’re either well credentialed in a CERTAIN type of work…or you’re unimportant. 

If you WANTED some ideas for a way FORWARD… to Sandel it comes down to TWO main things. We need to FIRST…collectively understand that individual upward mobility can NEVER fully account for all the factors that lead to inequality. And second…we need a political project that has at the CENTER of it’s FOCUS…the RESTORATION of the DIGNITY of WORK. 

COVID taught us a LITTLE bit about how IMPORTANT frontline workers are. But it’s not enough. We NEED a new AWARENESS campaign connected to actual POLICY decisions…that has the WORKERS that MAKE our societies even possible…at the CENTER of the consideration of the movement. Sandel thinks the political actors that manage to do THAT, in a way that is GENUINE…are going to be MASSIVELY successful. And again maybe part of the solution in SOME places will be ELECTING people locally that are truly FROM these types of positions…people who therefore draw on a different kind of WISDOM from people that ACTUALLY know what is going on. 

So as you can see…these ways to move FORWARD for Sandel are NOT going to be things that involve OVERTHROWING the BROKEN CAPITALIST SYSTEM. This is more of a communitarian approach… to shifting the way we THINK about each other. It has almost a SPIRITUAL component to it at times as WELL for Michael Sandel. And it COMES from bringing to people a RENEWED AWARENESS…of their POSITION within a society. 

See the TEAM FREEDOM approach to justice from LAST episode HIGHLY VALUES the protection of individual PREFERENCES. Just STAY out of my way…and let me DO what I WANT to do. But the PROBLEM with having that much of an individual FOCUS…is that people that LIVE in societies like that OFTEN just ASSUME…that the COMMON GOOD, what’s best for everyone…is just the SUM TOTAL of EVERYONE’S individual preferences. 

But what your LIFE in a society IS to Michael Sandel…to BE a citizen is NOT just I’m gonna wake up everyday and just EXERCISE MY FREEDOM. Your life as a citizen is MORE than just meeting up with some guy off craigslist in a walgreens parking lot seeing if you might/could wanna buy his jet ski for $400. It’s MORE than that. You’re part of a COUNTRY or a COMMUNITY that STANDS for something GREATER than that. 

Every COMMUNITY to Michael Sandel…every SYSTEM for that matter: every country, every company, every BIBLE study group…PRESUPPOSES SOME common conception of the GOOD. So to be a citizen…and this goes all the way down to his views on subjectivity and the self…to be a human BEING…is NOT to be an independent rational agent making FREE and autonomous choices…it’s to be an INTERDEPENDENT member of a community that PRESUPPOSES some conception of the GOOD. And then OBVIOUSLY…with the whole conversation we’ve been having for the last TWO episodes…there’s a responsibility that’s incumbent upon you AS A MEMBER of that community. 

Again Michael Sandel represents NOT one of these people that wants to overthrow Capitalism, though he DOES think there need to be some structural changes to it. He represents…a very OPTIMISTIC side of the conversations going on today…where he BELIEVES in our ability to arrive at civic agreements…that allow us to coexist in peace with each other, hopefully for extended periods of time, IF we are willing to do the work.

In this way an IMPORTANT thing to REALIZE about Sandel…is that he represents a type of thinker these days who’s highly SKEPTICAL towards the idea of Liberalism as being some rational way PAST the negative emotions of political disagreement. See, that’s another VERY popular TAKE when thinking about the issues of our day…there’s a lot of thinkers that believe…that some of the CENTRAL TASKS that things like Liberalism, Communism or Socialism are trying to accomplish…are just MISSING something IMPORTANT about what the challenges are that we’re FACING in politics. 

That EACH one of these STRATEGIES this person will say…TRIES to come up with some MECHANISM…that’s going to REMOVE the negative emotions from human beings ORGANIZING themselves. In Communism you could say it’s about removing the class struggle that’s foundational to this. In Liberalism you could say it’s about using rationality and science to arrive at a sort of OBJECTIVE CONSENSUS that makes disagreeing with things impossible. 

ALL of these and MORE this kind of person might say…are just ways of trying to avoid the INEVITABLE. That human beings WILL disagree…and it WILL be a messy business when they DO. And that maybe the path forward… SHOULDN’T be about trying to REMOVE political disagreement, but maybe the whole task of politics should be far more focused on CHANNELING this disagreement in a way that is productive. The work of Chantal Mouffe and her concept of Agonism comes to mind, which could be coming up SOON on this podcast. 

Anyway, as always, for those of you out there that GET it…thanks for GETTING it. If you’ve been listening for years you KNOW how this podcast is NOT a soap box for my own political beliefs, it NEVER will be. The GOAL, what I’m ALWAYS trying to do: is to make these ideas more accessible to people because I have an ENORMOUS amount of respect for these thinkers and the value they provide to the world, and I REMEMBER working at a warehouse doing MANUAL labor and WISHING that I had a PODCAST like this to listen to. And I get it it can be FRUSTRATING…if you don’t LIKE one of these ideas that you hear…who do you YELL at other than the HOST who is CLEARLY trying to indoctrinate people to be just like him. I just will never be that and I’m sorry there’s not a clearer person to yell at sometimes. But if you LIKE what I’m going for here thank you for making a show like this possible. Patreon.com/philsophizethis and as always. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.