The Importance of Consent

Today I’d like to talk a bit about #consent .?This has been a near obsessive topic of inquiry for me for several years, especially unearthing where it gets ignored or implicitly expected to be yielded for often moralistic reason, or in other words, where it seems to me it’s falling through the cracks, and nobody seems to be acknowledging that a problem even exists, or dismiss it as ‘inevitable’ without giving any genuine effort to considering how we might actually solve it.

Unfortunately, they’re all over.?Media continuously presents us with troubling (often dismissive) characterizations of situations that fundamentally involve violations or bypassing of consent. ?

YouTube content creator Pop Culture Detective takes a look at this in several videos deconstructing common problematic tropes in popular films and television, such as The Ethics of Looking.?They cover the obvious realm where this has been problematic, namely sexual consent and bodily sovereignty and consent.

But that’s really the area we’re probably most familiar already with spotting and acknowledging problems, even if they remain rampant at the moment.?There are some other areas that frankly concern me just as much.

What also concerns me is the privileged positions some narratives have in discourse, so much so that a sort of collectively dogmatic disposition to it develops, and challenges to that narrative itself become tantamount to acts of heresy (e.g. criticizing the concept of democracy).

Advertising as a human endeavor.?I already did a post on the rapey-ness of #advertising .

But really we’re still sorely lacking this in citizen representation in decision at group levels, which leads us into heretical territory.?Because the fundamental problem is that democracy no more supports individual-level, voluntary and informed consent of the governed than does any other tyranny.?And we *know* it’s a tyranny.?We *know* it’s inadequate, and yet such criticisms are met with glib dismissals of the “best worst option” sort, a throwing up of hands as if in more than 2000 years we couldn’t have come up with something better (“innovations” like the Senate model of representation and the Electoral College, don’t solve anything, they just undermine the integrity of a fundamentally flawed system). The fact that it fails to capture consent should be obvious in the phrase "Not my president!" angrily said by both Democrats and Republicans within the past couple of decades.

But of course, it runs much deeper than that. Democracy is the tyranny of the many, the idea that there are more of us, thus you have to do it our way, which is frankly little better than might-makes-right. Ultimately it's backed up by the implied threat of state violence for dissidence. Furthermore, what seems to be completely elided from the conversation is the fact that for the most part citizens get little-to-no say in what's actually voted on. Sure, there are referendums and similar instruments, but the citizens have no direct power to undo damage done by shitty laws enacted by Congress, or shitty Supreme Court decisions, or any other way that the US government routinely ignores or defies the actual will of the people.

We have no binding "None of the above" choice in voting for candidates, either. I don't mean a write-in. I mean explicitly being able to say no to the entire assortment of clowns that have been fielded for a political position without the impossible obligation to select some viable alternative from the usual vacuum of meaningful choices. A way to send a message that none of these are acceptable, and that those involved in conducting the election must go back to the drawing board and find acceptable candidates that people would legitimately want to vote for, whom they believe will genuinely represent their interests. If a plurality of voters vote this way, or no legitimate majority exists, anything less strikes me as a disingenuous approach to actual representation.

I think the reaction to this I like least is the one that jumps to the conclusion that if I don’t support democracy, I must support some other even worse tyranny, which could not be further from the truth.?We can and must do better.?What comes next must be able to preserve individual sovereignty and real consent, and balance it with the obvious need to coordinate activities harmoniously at the group level.?In other words, individuals cannot be trampled ‘for the greater good’, and the benefit and harmony of the whole cannot legitimately be trampled by the individual in pursuit of their life.?Things may have to take longer to resolve in order to meet this requirement, but I don’t see it as optional; it must be a founding principle of any system that can meaningfully replace democracy.?So far the most promising starting point I’ve seen for achieving this is known as Panarchy.

And how about work life??Surely modern technology has improved our lot, and we’re still moving towards that modernist notion of “progress’, and therefore the world of work is a good thing.

No, not really.?Sure, some people like to work.?I personally never did, though I will freely admit that I have managed to develop a number of skills I probably wouldn’t have had I never worked (some of them are even useful to me personally).?But I contest the idea that most people would choose to work in the conditions of employment we face currently if they had not been primed their entire lives to expect it, to believe that they were somehow immoral for not wanting to do this most unnatural human activity of working a job. Personally, I never, ever actually wanted a job (and I don't believe that I'm alone in this perspective); I just needed them due to circumstances I had little control over.

The sort of growth that built our modern world was constructed very explicitly on exploitation.?Obviously, slavery served this early on in this country.?But feudalism never really went away.?There has always been a large class of people in this country who we in essence born into and in most cases condemned to stay in a modern feudal life, not owning their own property, constantly having to seek employment to avoid the Hobbesian (red in tooth and claw) world that we built long ago, and that we have maintained since. Most of us have maintained and reinforced it voluntarily thanks to the conditioning we received to normalize the expectation that this was all somehow okay.? An artificial, depersonalized, and 100% avoidable threat has been allowed to exist, encouraged and defended in the strongest terms by those who benefit from the grotesque inequalities it creates.

Keeping people in a soft form of slavery Is harder when your population is literate, and even more so when communication is as rapid and worldwide as it is in our age.?And that requires controlling the narratives through propaganda, advertising, regulatory capture, industry capture, and just about every underhanded, devious thing that is capable of undermining of subverting the will of your captive population.

We’ve been fed this narrative of Individual Responsibility by those who benefit from this framing of it (mostly corporations and the ultra-wealthy).?And in this narrative, we are each responsible for our own selves, and if we fail to prosper, it’s our fault, and has nothing to do with a system that has been demonstrably stacked against the vast majority of us, and which ultimately extracts wealth from the many to be concentrated into the hands of a privileged very few.?And this is a feature, not a bug within the “free market capitalism” we’re taught to venerate.

We are born into this world and immediately labeled and categorized in numerous ways without being consulted about it, long before we could be, and our consent to it is literally never sought, or honored in any way if we deny it.?We are from birth labeled as citizens of some nation, as some gender, race, ethnicity, and numerous other factors that we are then “socialized” (indoctrinated) into and expected to uphold whether or not we ever actually identified voluntarily with any of them, whether or not we ever felt them to be true about ourselves.?With very few exceptions, whether or not we truly identify with these labels is never really investigated, and our consent to them is never validated (let alone remedied if found lacking), unless to condemn someone for failing to identify with them. These are all categories humans project onto the world, onto one another. Challenging or rejecting them has at least historically (in many of these cases still currently) met with ridicule, derision, hostility, accusations of betrayal.?I personally just never really related strongly to a few that were (mostly still are) applied to me automatically at birth.

We’ve built for ourselves a society that regularly disregards the importance of meaningful consent, and dismisses violations of it far too easily, especially depending on whose consent is allegedly violated and who is accused of the violation.?Only we can fix it.?And we won’t get there by giving up because it’s too hard, nor by refusing to look at these issues clearly and honestly, nor by taking short-cuts or making compromising in the corrections in the name of expedience.