Under the guise of empowerment and freedom, politicians and business are offloading lifethreatening risk to individuals
Suzanne Schneider at Aeon: I have for several years been working on a book about risk as a form of social and political logic: a lens for apprehending the world and a set of tools for taming uncertainty within it. It is impossible to tell the contemporary story of risk without considering what scholars call responsibilisation or individuation – essentially, the practice of thrusting increasing amounts of responsibility onto individuals who become, as the scholar Tina Besley wrote, ‘morally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculations’…
In Individualism and Economic Order (1948), F A Hayek wrote: ‘if the individual is to be free to choose, it is inevitable that he should bear the risk attaching to that choice,’ further noting that ‘the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.’ Over the past several decades, Hayek’s position has gone mainstream but also become somewhat emaciated, such that individual freedom substantively means consumer choice – the presumed sanctity of which must be preserved across all sectors. But devolved responsibility favours those with more capacity to evaluate and make decisions about complex phenomena – those of us, for instance, with high levels of education and social access to doctors and investment managers to call for advice. And indeed, it’s striking that the embrace of responsibilisation as a form of individual ‘empowerment’ has accompanied the deepening of inequality in Western democracies…
This trend persists despite growing recognition from psychologists and economists that most of us are not rational decision-makers and that we are particularly terrible at assessing risk. Whether it is the likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack or succumbing to COVID-19, research shows that people tend to overestimate high-profile threats and underestimate everyday ones like driving a car…
How can we account for this disconnect? Why, given our demonstrable lack of capacity, are we still charged with becoming better risk calculators? And what type of political subject is the actuarial self?…
Peter Bernstein (Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (1996)) traced the origins of risk to the 17th century, when these new ideas about human agency began to circulate alongside the mathematics of probability, which posited that past events could be systematically analysed to yield insights about the future. Such notions could arise only in post-Renaissance Europe, he argued, which explains why ‘the fatalistic Muslims were not yet ready to take the leap’ despite their mathematical sophistication. In Bernstein’s telling, the exceptionalism of European culture – not shifts in governance or the rise of capitalism – accounts for how the West broke the bonds of fatalism…
While positive associations still adhere to entrepreneurs and other ‘risk-takers’ today, they have become a minority discourse. This is one reason why Bernstein’s End-of-History-era euphoria sounds like a dispatch from another planet. For many, the language of risk instead denotes everything that could go wrong: climate risk, health risks, cyber risk, financial risk, terrorism risk, AI risk, and so forth. Outside certain pockets of Silicon Valley – such as the self-described techno-optimist Marc Andreessen – thoughts of the future are more likely to elicit anxiety or dread than excitement…
LAST PARA: The good news is that there are wonderful alternatives to the hyper-individualised world of the actuarial self: apprehensions of security that think at the level of communities, neighbourhoods and towns or cities or nations. In a world facing rising temperatures, pandemics and a globalised financial system, many have come to recognise the highly individualised approach to risk as a relic of an irresponsible and iniquitous era. Building more capacious forms of security and networks of care will require looking beyond the actuarial self and the fundamentally conservative political agenda it serves.
Read the whole article here.
