Value and Evaluation
Inequality as an Undeniable Consequence of Existence
J. Y. Gao
In light of the contextual progresses and sensitivities surrounding gender identity, identity politics, and pronouns, I wish to commence what I foresee as an extensive series within which I will explore these concepts with regard to their causes and consequences, as well as include an editorial suggestion. Of course, that isn’t to say that my opinions become invisible in the presentation of my content and the tone with which I do so save for a suggestive comment at the end; on the contrary, I will put forward my personal voice within the piece so that you may see that these topics are of great importance to me, and that it is precisely because of its relevance and exposure in today’s cultural landscape that I delve into these issues. I don’t write to offend, and so I will refrain from offensive tonality, yet I cannot guarantee an all inclusive article which cradles every individual’s hopes and dreams as if it were a new-born ready to live.
I thought I might commence this series with a definition of value. What is value? Why is value important? Where do we see ‘value’ manifest itself in our lives? These are some of the questions that we might tackle today.
A mouse sees a piece of cheese. For one reason or another, it decides to place a morsel in its mouth and swallow. During the time just before the morsel enters its mouth, there is a small dopamine release. It is satisfied after it swallows the piece of cheese for about 15 minutes. Consciously (to whatever extent that conscious may be compared to the human conscious, we don’t know, but it is there), the mouse assigns a positive value for a piece of cheese – or, more appropriately, the sensory information representative of cheese – and also for the feeling of satisfaction, as indeed, it is by nature a positive feeling. And henceforth starts the life of a mouse whose meek conscious ability saves the mouse from all existential questions about the meaning of life and adopts, wholly, the finding of cheese as its primary concern and, in anthropomorphised terms, a purpose to live for.
It is safe to say that the most commonly held opinion about the physical world is that it exists. And though there are fields of discursivity that challenge this assumption, it is one that we will stay with for the time being. Without conscious beings, like our mouse friend, or potentially even unconscious beings, the physical world has no inherent value. Its value comes from the quality that we describe it with (where ‘we’ stands for all conscious beings). This process assigns things with either positive or negative values at varying magnitudes. It is an all-encompassing, universal, existential, metaphysical number line. This assigning of values is a biological need as you can see from the mouse anecdote, and is, at its foundation, the definition of consciousness. It is our ability (‘our’ once again used inclusively to group all conscious beings) to choose based on what we want.
It starts with biological needs, but it quickly becomes something much more interesting. I borrow a slightly outdated psychological theory proposed in 1943 by Maslow, who describes our psychology in a pyramidal hierarchy ranking our needs from most instinctive to least instinctive. At the bottom is food, drink and shelter. The second level comprises safety needs. Though there have been numerous revisions of these needs and this pyramidal structure, I think we can extract a basic truth that is undeniable. When given the choice between shelter and no shelter, we choose shelter – save for some extraordinary circumstances. When given the choice between life and shelter, we would happily sleep in the rain, on the dirt, and live, rather than have shelter and die. Therefore, there is a hierarchy. Now, for some who perhaps are so heavily burdened by the weight of love, like Romeo and Juliet, that life seems pointless without the company of the other, then belonging and love might rank below physiological needs (see diagram below). But the point isn’t about the existence of THE pyramid of needs, but that everyone has A pyramid of needs custom to their circumstance and their individual psychology. Commonalities between pyramids form societies, which in reverse perpetuate these commonalities through its various functions. A society, consisting of individuals, will have a shared hierarchy that every individual subscribes to to a large degree. If your values lie primarily outside of this societal pyramid, or that one of your values betrays one of the more fundamental values of society – like a murderer does the preservation of life – then you are punished ‘justly’ by the law and by God and deemed an outcast of society sentenced to live a life of imprisonment. This is the intrinsic nature of society.
In regards to the society that we live in today, I think I can safely say that a vast majority (a majority so vast the minority can be deemed negligible for the sake of this argument but nevertheless important to mention) would rather be a rich, influential person than a homeless person. And as monetary and/or reputational success is a positive value held by the society,
I think it is fair to say that certain individuals like Martin Luther King Jr are of greater value to society than others, like a particular homeless man on the street. The police force and the public alike would very much agree on protecting Martin Luther King Jr in the case of an earthquake than the homeless man sleeping on the street corner. As sad as it may seem, or as intuitive as it may seem, it is a rather irrefutable truth. Both you and I don’t have police escort, body guards, presidential attention and thousands of people crowding the streets just to catch a glimpse of you. And therefore it is irrefutably true that society has, is, and will always treat individuals unequally.
It is impossible for the individual to not evaluate something when he/she observes; it’s an interesting thought experiment. Attempt to observe something as it is (refer to Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’). It is impossible. You will most likely have a noun to describe it, and, along with that, an extensive web of preconceptions about that object; you are inescapable from adjectives, and adjectives by their very nature EVALUATE. Hence it is the nature of this existence to evaluate – to assign value to – and society as a living and breathing mechanism is no exception. An individual can be more valuable or less valuable to society. Because society would rather save one individual over another by virtue of who they are – like an honest, kind person over a serial killer, no one is equal in the eyes of society.
Now of course you can assign yourself a value, and it is important that you value yourself highly. It isn’t healthy to devalue yourself, and it isn’t something that I am encouraging. What I am putting forward is that society will mercilessly evaluate you, and though it is important that you keep constant your value for yourself, regardless of what value society assigns you, it will largely define the success that you have in life.
In response to this, one might propose to change society, and thus I need to emphasise: it is impossible for an individual to not evaluate; evaluation is something that is inherently biological, psychological, conscious, subconscious, instinctive, primitive, academic, and inextricable from the EXISTENCE of consciousness. As long as the individual evaluates, the society evaluates. As long as the society evaluates, it will evaluate the individual. As long as society evaluates the individual, individuals – in respect to each other and society – will not be equal.
