Fear, Uncertainty, and Denial: relating economics and ethics via the political.
Omnia politic, or in other words everything being political, remains the subject of this essay. Thus, economics and ethics, and subsequently economic actors or ethical actors, remain objects of the political. This is to say that the objective of the political is to influence an outcome (whether desirable or not) on its objects: economic, ethics, or for that matter any other domain within its objective domain.
This essay, however, emphasises two subdomains of the political, namely, economics and ethics, for its evident effects on the natural and social ordering of a household, a society, or a civilisation at large. While economics, or the management of households often relates itself to the material conditions of this metaphysical reality, ethics distinguishes itself through its other-worldliness, an ideal. How the political attempts to elucidate upon the antagonism between the two remains the primary focus here.
The political must contend with on one hand, the descriptive nature of a material world, while on the other, take into account the prescriptions from an ideal word, giving birth to a dialectic between the ideal and the material. So it follows that the political serves as the platform upon which material ideals contest with the ideal material, assuming the essence of the former and the existence of the latter. In essence, a metaphysical reality, or the universalisable domain upon which political subjects can act upon, must objectively analyse the material ideals they encounter for their essentiality while subjectively synthesising the ideal material into existence.
Fear, being the primordial nature of the economic, gives rise to households or cooperation amongst individuals. Unlike contemporary understandings of global markets, greed (or an inhibition of fear) is not a strong marker for determining economic success; in other words, the stick is a superior driver than the carrot. It is worth remembering that necessity is the mother of all inventions, while scarcity remains the fundamental problem keeping actors in the economic realm busy.
Denial, however, refers to an abnegation of all that is fundamental to the economic realm. Ethical actors dwell on neither necessity nor scarcity when formalising and formulating their normative stances; a blatant disregard for the impact emerging from the application of such prescriptions. The homo economicus, the epitome of a rational actor in the economic realm becomes the anti-thesis for the ethical individual, favouring the irrational and unreal instead, an anti-political, not even an apolitical or non-political ideal; non-consumption.
Thus, uncertainty materialises itself as the pivot underlying all economic and the ethical quandaries. The political is defined by uncertainty, as it attempts to convert the antagonistic relationship between those fearful of and those denying fundamental descriptions of this metaphysical reality one finds oneself situated in, into one where all parties are merely agonised or inconvenienced. In sum, the political only seeks to ameliorate the effects of a hostile encounter between the economic and the ethical domains by way of redistributing the suffering or struggle across all members of the commons.
Together, fear, uncertainty, and denial, when mapped respectively to the economic, the political, and the ethical domains, could effectively promote a healthy and stable functioning of overlapping demographics, constituencies, and congregations despite their differences. Nevertheless, a mere inequality of power relations amongst the triad, may not necessarily imply a cause for a dysfunctional nation-state. An unequal state may continue to persist without fear of inequity or a denial of injustice, so long as the political entertains a certain level of uncertainty.