Story Time: The Cost of Life, Death, and Resurrection [NOT CLICKBAIT]

Welcome, class! We’re back on the grind this week. I hope you all feel rested because the unit to come is going to be a long and depressing one. At times, our limited-word discussions of the causes might make it seem like our trajectory is inevitable, especially when the symptoms have symptoms, but if we can start to understand that cycle, we can start thinking of ways to intervene.

We’ll start nice and slow with a 5-min story on:

The law of equivalent exchange.

In a land far, far away just before the outbreak of the first world war, a relatively new nation struggles to survive through the revolutionary process of addressing its original sin. The land is Amestris and it’s embroiled in a civil war. In the countryside, Trisha Elric, mother of two, is trying her best to shield her young sons from the realities of war when she falls ill and passes. The sons turn to the science of the day, alchemy, to bring their mother back to life.

Alchemy is limited by “the law of equivalent exchange” which has two parts:

An anime version of the conservation of mass/energy.
The nature of the input. Jesus might have been able to turn stones into bread, but Ed and Al can’t

Knowing this, the boys gather all the necessary ingredients to make an adult: 35L water, 20kgs carbon, 4L ammonia, 1.5kg lime, 800g phosphorous, 250g salt, 100g saltpeter, 80g sulfur, 7.5g fluorine, 5g iron, 3g silicon, and fifteen more elements to taste. And they get:

In Alchemy, there’s a god figure that plays the merchant in these exchanges. The merchant evidently doesn’t like the trade he’s been offered by the Elric brothers. Al loses his body. Ed loses his leg. Like a Mastercard commercial, the brothers learn that a human soul is priceless.

It’s a good lesson for the kids watching the show, but Commie Curriculum goes hard on the facts and the logics. In the real world, Mastercard, like the rest of society, has an exchange value on a life. Private COVID test: $300. Zaltrap, a cancer drug which added, on average, 42 days: $11 000. Civil liability in a person’s death: $2 000 000 (unless you have that cop discount).

Putting a number to a life isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Society has to make tough calls some times and numbers lend an air of objectivity. But not all numbers are created equal. Some are much more useful or more valid than others. And coming up with new ones is usually not as easy as converting predicted quality adjusted life years (QALY) to USD—ends up discriminating against people who are labelled as having less quality of life. And if we forget to carry the units over, so to speak, it’s easy to start comparing apples to oranges.

The question of reopening the economy can’t be answered by counting how many septuagenarians are willing to sacrifice themselves. How many QALYs of 70-year-olds should be risked for millennials to risk their lives in pursuit of underpaying jobs? How do we factor in the secondary and tertiary effects of the recession like increased crime rates, hesitancy to access medical services, decreased mental health, or stunted childhood development? Maybe we should let the economy crash; there’s research showing recessions increase life expectancy.

In the Elric story, Ed and Al realize that these comparisons are something they don’t want to engage in. Even if there was an exchange value for souls that the god-merchant would accept, Ed and Al vow not to deal in other people’s lives. In their experience, this calculation is usually done by those in power in an attempt to keep their power.

Like the Elricses, we want our society to value liberal, republican, democratic ideals like equality under the law and respect of persons not merely as means to an end. It’s why we’d be outraged if rich murderers got to use their get-out-of-jail-for-a-relatively-small-fee card like Purdue Pharma or other corporations that want to pretend they’re people [or actual people that takes advantage of the broken bail system], right? We’d be disturbed, to say the least, if we found out that our insurance companies traded in death bonds like a card game betting on our lives like we’re Deadpool. Or if our employer, who guaranteed the safety of our working conditions, took out life insurance policies against us while remaining the sole beneficiary like Walmart. We’d be up in arm, right? Maybe occupy the streets where big money pools.

We’re told some rights are inalienable, even by the self, regardless of the profit margin. In Canada, that means that outside of combat sports you can’t legally consent to being assaulted. When people get arrested for getting into fights, “they consented” isn’t a legal defense. This inconsistency is mostly for practical reasons; we don’t want “they consented” to become a defense for yet another charge. But it means that MMA, a multi-billion-dollar industry, is more than welcome in Canada, but the BDSM industry, regardless of their efforts regarding consent, is still legally suspect.

The libertarians—that I’m sure are active in this course—might agree that that’s stupid and we should deregulate completely, letting the market decide. But the market only gives a voice to people with wealth. At this point, UFC will definitely have an outsized voice over BDSM. Thankfully they aren’t directly in competition, so it might work out. But there are industries like the female soccer league that were prohibited by the dickless, penis-wielding soccer tycoons in the football association scared of competition. Monopolies exist and the market tends towards them.

It’s the same problem with Black inequality. Newly-freed slaves never get their 40 acres and a mule. Instead, the only compensation for slavery was to the slaveowner for their loss of “property.” When America did steal land to give away, most of it went to white immigrants not Black Americans. About a quarter of the current adult population can directly trace their wealth to that free land. And the almost feudal-system of privileging land has continued to systematically undermine the wealth of Black Americans. When the wealth gap is so big, it’s not surprising that the market had a lot of “whites-only” merchants. [And solving the wealth gap, but keeping the free market might just lead to more segregation.]

I think the idea, to give communities the power to govern themselves, is great. But we’d have to ensure that everyone’s voice is listened to regardless of the digits in their bank account.

The free-market-ists go wrong when they assume that the success in the market reflects some objective measure of reality. Objectivity isn’t some platonic ideal that, if reached, through armchair philosophizing, rigorous lab work, or not-so rigorous market mechanics, one doesn’t need to consider others perspectives before generalizing. Numbers might not lie, but they don’t tell the truth either. What we consider fact is just the current consensus of the cognoscenti. In less alliterative terms, objectivity is the consensus of subjectivities. Statistical analysis is figuring out what counts as consensus.

So, we need to reach out to as many subjects as we can. We might be the best experts of our own lives, but we’re not all that expert. We’re even worse when it comes to guestimating the lived experiences of others. To my knowledge, mind reading isn’t a thing and X-Men aren’t real. Most of us might pass the Sally-Anne test, but none us are scooting around on a wheelchair teaching kids to use their mutant powers.

I, like most of us, think I’m pretty normal. Even in the areas where I’m not. Up until second year uni, I thought everyone imagined killing themselves daily because I did. I picture shooting myself, or stabbing myself, or jumping off a building. Coincidentally, I really don’t like guns, knives, or heights. Anyways the point is, it’s really easy to make up a false consensus. So, we have to make sure to actually listen to each other.

There are problems with consensus building, obviously. On one hand, there are disingenuous actors, Nazis, and people who think 5G causes covid. On the other, it asks marginalized people to come up with the vocabulary to speak truth to power. Some times, it takes trauma touring for face-to-face interactions to generate a sense of empathy and solidarity for those that need it. But I’m trusting the experts when they say that the number of Nazis and Alex Joneses tend to decrease in societies with more social trust. Time’s running out, so we’ll have to postpone this discussion. But I’ll state the thesis here: People are generally pretty decent and pretty clever. We can be civil with each other even when we discuss hard topics and we can figure out what to do about those issues. We don’t need to devolve into angrily yelling at other powerless people.