29 March 2020

Invisible Men

“I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not to awake the sleeping ones.” Ralph Ellison’s nameless narrator in Invisible Man moves through a racially divided America as a specter, a ghost, reduced by individuals and institutions to a mere outline of a man.  He sits in a basement in Harlem, lit up into brilliant whiteness by electricity stolen from the city grid, and reminisces on his past above ground.

“Sometimes it is best not to awaken them,” he muses. “There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”

As the COVID-19 virus spreads throughout the world, stopping entire economies and societies in its track, the “invisible” that we have stored away and suppressed from daily awareness is rising to the fore.

In India, where I live, millions of day laborers and migrant workers are pouring across locked-down state borders, their belongings strapped to their backs, with the aim of walking hundreds of kilometers back to their villages. The cities are not their homes — but sources of critical income which have dried up and subsequently spit out the vulnerable from the basements and bunkers where they were temporarily housed. 

They are not the only ones:  domestic help, small business owners, hundreds of millions of “gig workers” with little to no employment and benefits security. The invisible have gone above ground, and they stare at Society with no more indictment than their everyday reality. Their vulnerability and lack of recourse has been the status quo for decades, only now it is coming sharply to light.

Invisibility is not only conferred to individuals, but also to institutions, structures and incentives that govern our societies. The invisibility of weak corporate balance sheets, pushed by sell-side analysts to leverage and to pay out any extra free cash in stock buy-backs or dividends, leaving little room to weather months of shut-down. The invisibility of healthcare systems with few mitigation protocols set in place for systemic shocks. The invisibility of a razor-thin global supply chain, channeling essentials across the world with innumerable dependencies on open borders and free movement. 

All of these previously hidden vulnerabilities are now coming to light.

We are the sleepwalkers amongst the invisible. And we are what is most dangerous in this world.

The Ruling Ideas 

There is that famous Marxist adage that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” These ideas are transmitted to us through institutions, media, “experts” and collectively naturalized into public consciousness to become “common sense,” “truth,” etc. In this sense, ideology is the least explicit yet most impactful form of consciousness, one that reproduces not just an individual, but an entire societal whole. 

This is not a leftist conspiracy; ideology is simply the way that any idea (left or right, authoritarian or democratic) is transmitted and naturalized to a collective. Ideology is transmitted not only through positive communication, but also through omission. By marking certain topics beyond the realm of “common debate,” and by celebrating ignorance, we surrender our decision-making power to the producers of ideology. 

What COVID-19 has done is expose the invisible, and thereby break the “objective illusion” of many ideologies governing our assumptions of the global economy.  Across the world and Internet, people are asking fundamental questions that strike at how we have designed our economy, communicating through social media, collective action, and of course — memes:

• Why are the people who do some of the most important work in society (teachers - as many WFH parents are discovering; or healthcare workers) paid the least?

• How can an economy sustain itself if its workers are too poor to purchase most of what is produced by companies?

• How can the stock market go up the same week that 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment?

• How can a currency remain healthy if its supply is arbitrarily expanded by trillions of units?

• Why do growth periods accrue wealth to a certain segment of society, while crisis periods spread pain equally across all?

The failure of modern-day economies, designed with misaligned incentives, morally-hazardous corporate political interest, hyper-financialization, and contradictions masked by technocratic, seemingly scientific language, is breaking down. I repeat, this is not a leftist conspiracy, nor is this an argument against capitalism, for the system we live in and depend upon is at best a bastardization of competitive free markets.

This is simply giving voice and form to the invisible that every single one of us live with, tolerate, and condone. 

“Ensuring that everyone is allowed to talk authoritatively about the economy is a prerequisite for a good society and a precondition for an authentic democracy,” an economist once wrote. Taking this moment in history to spark collective discussions and involve a greater number of perspectives into the design of a future-proof economy may be one of the best derivative effects of the virus — an opportunity to give light to the invisible, rethink our assumptions, and break free from the dumb distractions of ideology. 

This is a Dry Run

The COVID-19 breakout was not a black swan event, something of such improbability that it was impossible for societies to prepare for it. It was in fact, as Nasim Taleb himself wrote, a white swan event — an event of extremely high probability at long time scales.

Our global economy, in its current form, is unable to plan for some of the most important and obvious white swans facing humanity’s future. Climate change and its massive geological implications is the most obvious example. We conveniently label such events “externalities” — and we omit them from our economic models and asset values because our current regime cannot adequately put a “price” on such events. 

The time to face such a future is now. Indeed, in moments of crisis, when 24 hours may seem like years of developments, the longest time-scale perspective is actually the most resilient and relevant. For history may not repeat itself, but man always does. 

It is especially at these times where we should be having conversations about the distant past and the distant future. How did we design a system with these vulnerabilities and contradictions - how did this come to be? And where will we end up, if we take this current system to its logical conclusion, in hundreds or thousands of years? What actions will we take - once we have brought the invisible to light?

For we are the sleepwalkers amongst the invisible. And we are what is most dangerous in the world.