The Right to Get Tired

Every political theory keeps an ideal citizen somewhere in the building. The republic needs the virtuous one, the market the informed one, the deliberative democracy the one who reads the consultation document, the movement the one who comes to the meeting after the shift. The theory rarely says it needs them, but it shows it when they are absent. In practice the informed consumer turns out to be a person comparing insurance plans at eleven at night, and the engaged citizen is a daughter who has already spent the afternoon on hold. When the organizer who held the local together moves away, the local folds. Seen from underneath, the theory's conditions of success are a job description. The job is unposted, unpaid, and filled by whoever is nearest to qualifying for it.1

Four permanences

Four permanences sit under this sequence, and each one converts an aspiration into an institutional question. Human imperfection is permanent. People will be tired, distracted, wrong, selfish on Tuesdays and generous on Thursdays, and a good arrangement changes none of that. So no socially desirable arrangement can depend indefinitely on exceptional conduct. The design has to hold when the conduct is ordinary.

Institutional imperfection is permanent. Rules compress the world they govern, and the compression is always wrong somewhere. Getting the initial rules right cannot substitute for keeping correction, contestation and recourse alive. This archive has spent two hundred essays on those three.2

Disagreement is permanent. Interests compete, and no program of education or moral development will retire the competition. So governance has to run on people who do not agree and are not going to.

Human life is finite. The sequence has left this one alone until now, and it turns the other three into a bill. Maintaining correction takes hours. Contesting takes hours. Organizing against a disagreement that will never end takes hours. Those hours come out of lives that have a fixed number of them. Who spends them is a distributive question of the same rank as who owns what and who bends when the rule meets the world.

Underneath all four is a distinction between a politics that tries to produce better people and one that changes the conditions under which imperfect people live together. Only the second can survive its own members. The first treats improvement as a precondition of membership: you are protected once you are the kind of person the arrangement was built for. The second treats it as a bonus. People can become more capable, more conscientious, more virtuous, and the arrangement takes the gift without having required it.3

The maintenance ledger

The earlier essays followed one burden: the remainder a rule leaves when it meets a case it cannot hold, and the person who absorbs it so the rule can go on calling itself adequate. A second burden runs alongside the first and is easy to mistake for it. The maintenance ledger, as I will call it, records what it takes to keep the corrective arrangements alive. Its entries are the complaint that has to be filed, the pattern that has to be documented before anyone will believe it is a pattern, and the appeal that has to be traversed. Then come the meeting that has to be attended, the union that has to be kept from lapsing, and the committee seat that has to be filled again this year because nobody else will.

Standing, the sequence has argued, turns an experienced residual into admissible evidence. Appeal, review, complaint and organized refusal are the channels of consequential contradiction that keep power corrigible, and all four are labor.4 An institution's capacity to learn from its errors runs on the people who detect them. When those people are the ones the errors landed on, the correction mechanism has the same shape as the defect. The institution improves, and the person who was wronged supplies the improvement, unpaid, in addition to having been wronged. Sara Ahmed's study of complaint, drawn from testimony by academics and students who complained at universities, found the same shape: the procedure exists, and the complainant pays much of its cost in time and effort.5

Enter that as the ledger's first line. Correction that depends on the vigilance of the affected is a burden transfer with a grievance procedure attached. It looks like accountability, but its books show that the institution learned nothing it was not made to learn by someone who could not afford the lesson.

Rented protections

The second entry is stranger, because it appears on the winning side. A movement wins something, and a protection is written down: a staffing ratio, a right of appeal, a bargaining unit, a rule that the algorithm may be contested. The protection then has to be kept. Someone monitors the ratio. Someone brings the test case that keeps the appeal right from becoming ceremonial, and runs for the position that keeps the unit certified. The people who do this are, with remarkable consistency, the people who won it, because they are the ones who know what it cost and what it was for.

Keeping the gain costs something, and the cost is paid in the same currency as the struggle: attention, evenings, the willingness to be the difficult one at the meeting. A protection that exists only while someone works to keep it is rented rather than owned. The rent is due monthly, and the tenant cannot stop paying because everyone else's tenancy runs through the same payment. Iris Marion Young argued that responsibility for structural injustice is shared by everyone connected to the structure. In the maintenance ledger, that shared responsibility is discharged by the same dozen people, until they cannot.6

Here emancipatory politics reproduces the arrangement it opposed. The institution ran on the adaptability of its least powerful members and called their endurance consent. The movement against it runs on the vigilance of its most committed members and calls their exhaustion dedication. Only the valence has changed, and the routing is still the same. When a liberation has to be maintained by heroic conduct from the people it liberated, it has changed who the crumple zone protects, and there is still a crumple zone.7

Can they get tired?

Any arrangement can be put to a test drawn from the ledger. Can its members get tired, make mistakes, withdraw from organizing, pursue interests that have nothing to do with it, and eventually be replaced? Can they do all that without making everyone else's rights and security precarious?

The test moves the definition of freedom. An institutional arrangement changes the conditions of freedom when it removes a burden. It changes them again, by the same amount, when it changes what people must keep doing to preserve the removal. The sequence has already said that when the remedy costs more than the harm, the right is a paper right.8 If a right's continued existence costs someone their evenings, it carries a standing maintenance charge, and the person paying it is not free in the sense the right was supposed to secure.

Non-domination, on Philip Pettit's account, is the absence of exposure to uncontrolled power. It has mostly been treated as a stock, something a person has or lacks, but the maintenance ledger shows it as a flow. The protection is there this year because it was worked for this year, and the person supplying the work cannot stop without draining it for everyone.

Albert Hirschman's three options price this. Exit is available, and exit means losing the protection along with everything else. Voice is available, and voice is the maintenance work itself, in its most demanding form. Loyalty keeps the person from leaving after the organization has become destructive. In a collective arrangement, loyalty means knowing that you are free to leave and that, if you do, the appeal right lapses for the people behind you. That knowledge turns an available exit into an unusable one, and it works hardest on exactly the people who could be relied on to stay.9

Redistribute, or design out

The obvious remedy is a fairer division. Joan Tronto's caring democracy asks who has been allowed to evade the responsibilities others carry, and the answer to that question is almost always worth acting on. But the maintenance ledger exposes a limit on redistribution. Even if the vigilance were divided perfectly, the total would still be a quantity, and the quantity might still be more than the people involved have to give. Take a committee that needs forty volunteer hours a month to keep a protection alive. Finding forty people to give one hour each would not make it sustainable, because the arrangement would then require forty people to remain the kind of person who gives an hour, forever.

Some burdens should be shared and others designed out. The line between them follows the two meanings of maintenance this archive has been separating: the maintenance that keeps people alive and the maintenance that keeps a system standing.10 A protection that needs the affected to keep proving the pattern is a system asking to be maintained. The design alternative is a protection that detects its own failure, an institution that carries the vigilance as a funded function rather than as an unstated expectation of its members. A funded function has its own way to fail. If the staff paid to keep watch answer to the institution they watch, they learn what it can afford to hear, and the vigilance has moved up a floor without getting any cheaper. The people the protection is for need the power to replace them. The remainder statement already asks who carries the reconciling when a rule runs. A remedy owes the same lines: how many hours per year does this protection consume, drawn from whom, and what is in place when they stop?11

Elinor Ostrom's work is the honest objection. Arrangements that last are arrangements people participate in, monitor and sanction, and she found no durable commons that ran on nobody. The right to get tired cannot mean the right of everyone to do nothing at once. It means the work is bounded, rotated, replaceable and paid, and that the arrangement has a shift end. A duty with a shift end is compatible with ordinary lives. A duty with no end is a conscription that has learned to describe itself as citizenship, and the people best at it are the first to break.

Hannah Arendt's objection runs the other way. If politics becomes wholly the organization of necessity, what is left for action, for initiative that serves no further purpose? The answer runs through the same door. The person who must attend the meeting is not choosing to be there, so what they do falls short of action in her sense. Freeing people from compulsory maintenance makes chosen participation possible, and a society that needs fewer heroes is the only kind in which heroism can be a decision.12

An afternoon with no purpose

Underneath the institutional argument is a claim about what a person is owed, and it is easy to state and hard to design for. A person should be allowed to have intense convictions without those convictions becoming the organizing principle of every hour. They should be allowed to care about domination and also to make a terrible joke, love their spouse, follow a band, and lose a Saturday to nothing. A politics of freedom can keep demanding morally exemplary conduct, permanent attention and evidence of socially beneficial activity from the people it freed. When it does, it has reintroduced from the inside the pressure it was supposed to remove. It has told them that their afternoons are provisionally theirs, pending the next thing that needs holding together.13

Separating the production of better people from changing the conditions for imperfect ones makes room for something the demand cannot. People may become more virtuous, more capable and more attentive without any of it being a condition of secure membership. The improvement is welcome when it comes, and membership is secure without it.

The sequence is left with a question of quantity. How much of a person's life is an arrangement entitled to consume in exchange for protecting them? This archive holds every institution to the rule that dependence generates obligation upstream faster than it generates command downstream.14 Applied to maintenance, the rule says that the more an arrangement depends on its members' vigilance to remain corrigible, the more it owes them a way to stop being vigilant. An institution that cannot survive its members' ordinary lives has been staffed rather than built.