Series 1: A Day in the Life of the Bad Guy
If you’ve ever seen the movie Wreck-it-Ralph, you know that sometimes it’s just the nature of “the game” that causes someone to be perceived as bad, and if you haven’t, stay tuned and allow me to justify why I still watch children’s movies.
Earlier this year I found myself right smack in the middle of the game, chosen to preserve democracy, pitched against the nature of the human man himself, and ultimately I discovered that we experience more democratic failures at the most local of levels than we have ever realized. My story begins during my days as a freshman dorm-dweller. The fraternity I had joined earlier in the year had a merit system in place for choosing rooms when we finally graduated to living in our chapter house as sophomores. By volunteering to set up for philanthropy events, picking up decorations for a weekend social, or simply taking out the garbage, we would receive a certain number of “house points” that would accumulate throughout the year.
Once we made it to the chapter house we had lost our opportunity to earn any type of merit, and the new freshman class was now doing all of the chores that we had completed to earn our rooms. [The change was a result of us, as Sophomores, no longer having the opportunity to stay involved in a structured system which rewarded house points for good behavior or household chores. As Sophomores, we would no longer even receive e-mails regarding these opportunities. They would only be sent from the President and Vice President of the Chapter to the new freshmen, and therefore, we were on our own when it came to living arrangements for our junior year.] (Edited on 4/13/16) We decided to use a randomizer program from Google, and inevitably, many were upset with the results.
Some who had dedicated precious time to the operations of the chapter ended up with poor rooms, and others who were thought to have contributed next to nothing were “rewarded” with some of the best rooms in the house. This posed an issue, and therefore when it came time to choose rooms for our senior year, we had all agreed on a policy change. The issue was that, without a merit system in place, we had to decide on a fair way to allocate rooms for our final year together.
Going into our deliberation, it was almost a unanimous decision to find a “Democratic” approach to our situation. The people wanted fairness, but having now seen numerous approaches to this same situation, I was skeptical at its plausibility. No matter how we decided to allocate rooms, there would always be someone unhappy with their situation, which in our eyes, was a failure.
At the time I had not yet learned of Karl Marx’s “Egoistic Man” but his theory was rooted deep within the motivations of man, and would become evident soon enough. As Wendy Brown argues in her analysis on Karl Marx’s ideology[1], man is inclined to act only in his own self-interest, as a “Hobbesian Subject” and in the case of our housing issue, by selecting the best room for oneself. In layman’s terms, we knew that allowing each person to choose their room would result in the best rooms being chosen the most, and thus any form of Self-Governance was quickly ruled out.
We knew the only other option would be a representative process in which the will of my housemates would be exercised through an unbiased representative. Enter me! In the interest of “getting it over with” I offered to settle for a small and serve as an unbiased representative for the rest of my housemates. John Stuart Mill[2] argued in his analysis on Representative Bodies that a government is run very similar to a business. “The same person may or body may be able to control everything, but cannot possibly do everything.”
Mill was right; one person cannot possibly do everything. While I was able control the process of selecting rooms, I alone was not enough to truly represent the needs of 20 other people. I tried to carefully create a plan that placed a group of housemates not in a specific room, but on a specific floor of the house based on their combined interests. I tried to be as Democratic as possible by placing housemates on the same floor as those who shared similar interests; class schedules, school majors, sleeping schedules, and general house hold standards.
[Where I went wrong was in believing that I was taking on the role of a "Descriptive" Representative [3], when I was in fact failing to notice my tendency, as described by Jane Mansbridge, to advocate on behalf of a certain group as opposed to the larger group which I was chosen to represent. Without even realizing, I had forgot to consider the fact that my group of friends consisted of two distinct groups, one being those who had been initiated during the Fall Semester, and the other being those initiated during the Winter Semester.] (Edited on 4/13/16) It was so close to working, but here I am, the scapegoat to it all, still talking about it today.
Mill was right; one person cannot possibly do everything. While I was able control the process of selecting rooms, I alone was not enough to truly represent the needs of 20 other people. I tried to carefully create a plan that placed a group of housemates not in a specific room, but on a specific floor of the house based on their combined interests. I tried to be as Democratic as possible by placing housemates on the same floor as those who shared similar interests; class schedules, school majors, sleeping schedules, and general house hold standards.
[Where I went wrong was in believing that I was taking on the role of a "Descriptive" Representative [3], when I was in fact failing to notice my tendency, as described by Jane Mansbridge, to advocate on behalf of a certain group as opposed to the larger group which I was chosen to represent. Without even realizing, I had forgot to consider the fact that my group of friends consisted of two distinct groups, one being those who had been initiated during the Fall Semester, and the other being those initiated during the Winter Semester.] (Edited on 4/13/16) It was so close to working, but here I am, the scapegoat to it all, still talking about it today.
Our 22 Room Chapter House, back when life was good!
Check back next time for a special edition blog post with interviews from some of my housemates on their feelings about the situation!
No comments:
Post a Comment