What we don't ask when we belong
On Akeel Bilgrami's conditions for the unalienated life, and pizza as currency.
Once, there was a Tuck Shop without a shopkeeper.
You wandered in, grabbed what you needed, scribbled an entry in a register, and wandered right out. No locks, no cameras, no threat of being caught.
And still, nothing ever went missing. Not once.
The theme of the ‘un-alienated life’ has stalked me through a few chapters of my life, most recently in my lecture halls and academic texts. But perhaps the first time I looked it square in the face and said, 'Hey! I've heard them talk about you! Nice to finally put a name to the face' was when I was told of how the Tuck Shop in my school used to operate. It might very well be complete mythology since boarding school folklore has a way of burnishing ordinary events into moral parables, but I delight in even the slightest possibility of its truth.
Simply, the question of "What if I pay, but everyone else just walks off?"1 was never asked by anyone. It just didn’t belong to their world - at least not then, not there. This is the engine that animates what Akeel Bilgrami calls the un-alienated life. And here are its moving parts (do stay with me here):
1. The idea that this question never occurs to someone part of a 'high-trust' group is not a moral ideal, but a cognitive one. This cognitive architecture circumscribes not merely what we think, but what is thinkable.
2. In that sense, it is a way of relating, and not a conscious exercise but a mentality (and that is the exact term he uses). The foregone conclusion you’re operating from, is that you believe that you belong to a whole whose parts cannot be disengaged from each other. Two crucial points here:
2.1. This mentality, (alternatively, frame of reference; alternatively, paradigm) is not a prediction of how the rest will behave, as much as it is the spirit of the matter. Bilgrami's father said to him "let us see ourselves this way" - an invitation to inhabit a different story about who we are together.
2.2. Mentality (good, and especially if bad) is not compulsory. Bilgrami's offering to those of us who feel resigned or forced to ask ourselves the co-operation question2 is gently subversive in saying "dismount the treadmill!".
Stride to a different pace of being. Put on a differently tinted pair of glasses. Tune into a channel whose shadows and sounds reflect off your mind's eye in kinder, softer, warmer ways.
3. This optionality of mentality is but a different flavour of the idea that most walls are just lines on the floor and that we are condemned to be free. Can and will you choose to show up in the world differently?
4. The unconscious and automatic nature of such a mentality also means that its existence is only felt through its absence. When this mentality lapses, and you feel like a stranger in your own life, you notice what there is a lack of. This manifests in trite, tried and tested ways: bribing people to show up for supposedly shared endeavours with mandatory attendance or pizza3; feeling like you must pay for people to want to write for your community magazine; the dis-ease you feel (and you’re not quite sure why) when you hear manufactured labels of over-familiarity in corporate settings - hearing managers address subordinates as "family” while maintaining hierarchies that make familial care impossible.
Most of us live this way, without community or commons (cultural and physical both: almost all third places in modern cities are paid, and is it really a third place if you’re made to pay for it? And if it is, do the poor not deserve third places? What if you cannot afford admission into belonging? Bring back town squares.)
This is what it means to live an alienated, disengaged life.
There is good news and bad news.
The good news is that an alienated life is not inescapable. Bilgrami points to ‘pockets of unalienatedness even amidst our alienated modernity that we so lament’. He says these emerge when we deliberate from different ‘frames’.
I take this to mean something adjacent to the mentality exercise we have been referencing until now. Beyond (but really, in conjunction with) this cognitive dimension, I’d like to suggest that these pockets may also exist spatially and temporally: intentional communities, grassroots organisations, lots of boarding schools, communes, and admittedly, cults.4
The bad news is only bad inasmuch as it is tough news: it is upon us to create these frames (in space, time and thinking) for unalienatedness. This is hard work requiring either tremendous courage, magnificent indifference or radical clarity (in the kind of world I inhabit, at least).
To resist being swept into institutional machinery that deposits you at the start line of a race you weren’t aware you signed up for - that is tough.5 Even tougher is to waddle aside before the starting gun is fired, only to find yourself alone on the sidelines. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. At least the exhaustion from running this race can be dulled by energy drinks and motivational slogans.
What salve exists for the solitude of standing at the sidelines? You begin to wonder if the problem is you, and not the race. You cycle through moralizing (don't others feel responsible for something larger?) and mistrusting; doubting (is my discomfort just fear of hard work and a life of linear progress? am I rationalizing personal inadequacy?) and distrusting; all the while restlessly searching for the ‘regular’ tracks of the world that you seem to have lost somewhere along the way.
Utter unemployability may be our solution.
I have some answers, but mostly, I have questions - lots of them harried and harassing, almost (definitely, almost definitely). And I suspect I broadcast this youthfully solipsistic angst more often than I’d like.
Last semester, I cornered a (very sweet, very fantastic) professor of mine after dinner outside the dining hall in a comically distressed state. Said professor had earned his undergraduate degree in Hotel Management, decided he despised the whole thing, and pivoted to an academic career in History.
This particular crisis of mine was triggered by bureaucratic apathy from a law firm’s HR - which somehow, at that point, made me believe I was to be unemployed for the rest of my life. I dumped my entire portfolio of twenty-something woe is me in his lap and said, "It is now your job to decode this emotional debris field."
I got onto my philosophical soapbox about the chokehold that the law school to corporate pipeline had us all in, lamenting this particular flavour of intellectual and communal apathy afflicting prestigious Indian law schools - the kind whose symptoms include students only attending fascinating (and important) lectures if they get mandatory attendance credit (or pizza).
In the midst of our conversation, my professor said something which, in its ridiculousness and ridiculous perceptivity both, put a mirror to my melodrama (mirror, mirror, on the wall; who is the biggest fool of them all?). I’m paraphrasing here, but he said something like:
“We were always involved in local social movements and intellectual life beyond coursework because why wouldn’t we be? We weren’t constantly building our CVs. We knew we were utterly unemployable anyway. Might as well spend time doing meaningful, interesting things together.”
He definitely said utterly unemployable. I giggled for a few minutes.
What is most representatively human.
I get the sense that this is the secret you stumble into in the possibly mythical Tuck Shop. Maybe not utter unemployability, but close enough. When you're not constantly calculating your next move in some grand game of life, space opens up for different kinds of relationships. Space for trust, for assuming good intentions and for experimenting with belonging.
You don’t guard your seat. You don’t hover over your belongings. You forget to check if you’re being watched.
My deeper invitation and yearning here is for this kind of unselfconscious participation in the world.
Just as the machinery of modern life continues to spin, there will be spaces we create in the margins - pockets of unalienatedness that we can tend to long enough to see what grows. To quote Bilgrami one last time, we can dare to find out what is most representatively human.
There’s no denying the ache beneath this invitation, and sometimes I worry that this ache is a kind of naivety I’ll one day laugh at. But I’m not laughing yet, and maybe I’m not despairing at all. I’m still writing, aren’t I?
‘What if I paid the cost of cooperation and others did not?’ is the exact way in which Bilgrami phrases this.
It’s what someone always says, with half a shrug and full defeat: “this is real life, ya, the real world.” As if cynicism were adulthood’s entrance fee.
I’m not inventing this. NALSAR’s pre-placement talks are sparsely attended unless there’s pizza on offer. No one wants to be there, but cold Domino’s has an ancient pull. Careers, apparently, taste like rubbery cheese.
The tragically circular irony is that students aren’t showing up of their own volition because attending the talk doesn’t actually increase your chances of getting hired due to the anonymity of an audience. Why show up if it isn’t part of the conveyor belt, even if it’s by the very firm I’m trying to get placed at? I’ve shown up to more pizza talks than I’d like to admit. It’s easier than asking the harder questions about what I actually want.
Some places stumble into belonging and some engineer it. I’ve found that the distinction isn’t always as sharp as we’d like to believe, having been accused (mostly playfully) many times of belonging to a cult because of how KFI ‘kids’ (although some alum are older than 90, I believe) behave.
The pipeline doesn’t feel like a funnel until you look up and realise it’s spat you out. One day you’re at your first-year orientation to law school, and the next you're unlocking the door to a flat you never chose, in a city that feels borrowed. You leave at 8, return after 11 and can’t remember ever saying yes. Just that you never said no.
in all of my routine summer check-ins with friends this break, i've struggled to describe exactly what becoming friends with you has been like. thanks for finally giving me the vocabulary to describe it - you make me feel unalienated :)