Ömer Faruk Alişan
@omeralisan
Doktor
Malatya Fen Lisesi, Ankara Üni. Tıp Fakültesi
Rize, Fındıklı
Rize
25 okur puanı
Mart 2023 tarihinde katıldı
Şu anda okuduğu kitap
The problem is that it’s even better for an individual if everyone else cooperates but if he or she can outsmart all the other people. In other words, uncooperative behaviour is always the best choice for every single person, regardless of whether or not other people cooperate: if I’m going to be lied to, I’m better off lying myself. If the others are honest, I’m still better off lying. Non-cooperation becomes the dominant strategy, and so mutual non-cooperation emerges as a stable Nash equilibrium: no one person can unilaterally break out of this equilibrium without putting themselves at a disadvantage. The paradox in the prisoner’s dilemma is that it shows how individual rationality and collective reasoning can fall apart. When everyone acts rationally on an individual basis, the results are collectively suboptimal. The fruits of cooperation remain unharvested.
The American ecologist observed that natural resources – farmland or fish stocks, for example – tend to be exploited beyond the limits of their capacity if they are not privately owned. Regardless of how others behave – sustainably or exploitatively – the best strategy for every individual is to over-exploit the resource in question. The benefits of this misconduct can be absorbed by every individual; the costs are ‘externalised’ to the rest of the collective.
Social scientists of all kinds have been engaged in these sorts of anal yses for at least a century, overtly or covertly When I add covertly, I mean that many social scientists would not define their activities as be ing so immediately tied to the exercise of public rationality. They might define it rather as the pursuit of more perfect knowledge in the abstract. But even when they do this, they know that the knowledge that they produce is being used by others to help achieve the more perfect society. And they are aware that the economic underpinnings of their scientific research are conditioned on their ability to show social benefi t from the work, at least in some longer run. The same Enlightenment assumptions, however, can lead us in a dif ferent, even opposite, direction. The presumed rationality of the social world, just like the presumed rationality of the physical world, implies that lawlike propositions may be formulated that describe it fully and that such propositions hold true across time and space. That is to say, it implies the possibility of universals that can be stated exactly and ele gantly and concludes that the object of our scientific activity is precisely to formulate and test the validity of such universals. This is of course nothing but the adaptation of Newtonian science to the study of so cial realities. And it is therefore no accident that, already in the early nineteenth century, some authors used the label of “social physics” to describe such activity.
The concept of citizen makes no sense unless some are excluded from it. And'the some who are to be excluded must be, in the last analy sis, an arbitrarily selected group. There is no perfect rationale for the boundaries of the categories of exclusion. Furthermore, the concept of citizen is bound up with the fundamental structure of the capital ist world-economy. It derives from the construction of a states-system that is hierarchical and polarizing, which means that citizenship (at least in the wealthier and more powerful states) is inevitably defined as a priv ilege that it is not in its members’ interest to share. It is bound up with the need to hold in check the dangerous classes, and they can best be held in check both by including some and by excluding others. In short, I am arguing that the entire discussion about integration and marginalization has led us into a cul-de-sac, out of which there is no exit. Better not to enter it and instead to begin to conceive how we can go beyond the concept of citizen. Of course, this means going beyond the structures of our modern world-system. But, since I believe that our modern world-system is in a terminal crisis (a case I do not have the time to develop now),6 we should perhaps at least consider the kind of historical system we wish to construct and whether it would be possible to dispense with the concept of citizen; and if so, to replace it with what?