Differentiating reflexivity
The world of inherent imbalances
Exchanges are indispensable for those who live in the world of modernity. Money plays a critical role as a medium with which to procure a variety of goods and services. Exchanges are preceded by research on such goods and services, including sellers’ reputations and competencies, on the side of purchasers, and demands and preferences on the side of sellers. Information is exchanged through various modes of communication as well as goods and services exchanged for money.
In either case, exchanges tend to presume a state of equilibrium in terms of values as if to be equated between parties taking part in exchanges. While values in monetary terms can be definitive in numbers, those entailed in information are ambiguous. Regardless of the definitiveness or ambiguity over values, parties are understood to have agreed upon them, such that each is supposed to reciprocate the other based upon rights and obligations as agreed.
While the consensual agreements over potentially contentious values are to be appreciated, we should not underestimate the significance of power that enables exchanges of different values by means of the negotiated-equation. Even seemingly simple purchase agreements in terms of definitive monetary values entail the issue of power. In addition to varying endowments between purchasers and sellers, exchanges are initiated by those who believe to take advantage of differences, meaning that no exchange can be equitable at all. Exchanges are enforced and accepted so that power imbalances are more likely to be exacerbated than moderated.
The virtue of exchanges resides in efficiency based upon values that are standardized and normalized. Exchanges may enhance productivity and redistribute resources mainly by invoking quantities. They might also contribute to facilitating mutual understandings through enhanced communications. However, rationalization, standardization and normalization are all indeed powerful double-edged swords. Even simple exchanges of information are enabled by significantly compromising one another’s uniqueness.
We should stop pretending as if there were certain qualifications that exempt ourselves from bearing the responsibility for discarding one another’s uniqueness. Discarding uniqueness makes us exchangeable thus substitutable parts. No one can by any means be qualified to determine anyone’s identity between uniqueness and sameness but carry the indeterminacy even after reaching consensuses through intensive consultations. In this world of inherent imbalances, the simplest assertion that this and that are the same is an exercise of power.
Our seemingly innate longing for being or doing good is actually emergent from struggles with discordant concordance or concordant discordance. Morality cannot be understood as the fundamental logic that guides human thoughts and behavior but as emergent phenomena as a result of human reflexivity.
The reflexivity that is tautological but orientated towards value creation needs to acknowledge the inherent imbalances or disequilibrium in ways that are related to power. By so doing, it offers us methods to interpret reality without presuming precursors. Presuming precursors is one of weaknesses in human cognitive capacities. The only measure to cope with the weakness is to trust one another’s willingness to be or do good, which, however, cannot but rely on their aesthetic as well as rational judgments on (un)fairness by imagining power imbalances or asymmetries that underlie even sufficiently rigorous objects and facts as well as concepts.
Quite paradoxically, to materialize equality in democratic and participatory ways, we need to start by presuming inequities and end by leaving gaps for others to fill in with their own moral and aesthetic as well rational judgments. We should become reflexive enough to restrain from prescribing any definitive measure for equality but to become aware of one another’s reflexivity, including seemingly irrational and precarious desire to bet on scarce chances of luck.
