The Unnecessary — Summary

This is the essay the series was avoiding. The floor, the commons, the contribution, the gathering: all described with warmth and tentative optimism. This essay has the thing underneath.

What happens to people when nobody needs them? Not when they lose a job. Job loss is temporary. What we are describing is structural. The economy does not need Ravi. Not temporarily, not until the recovery. The drone is cheaper, more reliable, does not need a room or a reason to get up. Multiply by millions: delivery riders, call center workers, data entry clerks, warehouse workers, drivers. The aggregate is a class defined not by what it produces but by its irrelevance.

Every human society has stratified by contribution. The unnecessary class breaks this principle. The person on the floor contributes nothing the economy measures. Not labor, not capital, not consumption at a level that matters, not taxes, not military service. The state has always maintained populations that did not contribute, the very old, the very young, the disabled, but these were understood as temporary or exceptional. The unnecessary class is a permanent structural position occupied by working-age adults who are capable but for whom no contribution is required.

What does the state want from them? The honest answer: as little trouble as possible. Stay healthy, because illness is expensive. Stay calm, because unrest is destabilizing. The investment logic shifts from development to maintenance. You do not develop an asset you do not use. You maintain it at the lowest cost that prevents it from becoming a liability.

Every human society in the anthropological record has organized around reciprocity. Mauss’s gift economy. Sahlins’s forms of exchange. The principle is constant: I give, you give, and in the giving we constitute ourselves as a society. The unnecessary class has nothing to give that the systems around them require. The system does not exploit them. It does not need them. The absence of need is harder to organize against than the presence of exploitation, because exploitation at least implies a relationship.

Viktor Frankl argued that meaning is the irreducible human need. The floor provides comfort and safety. It does not provide meaning, because meaning cannot be provided. Meaning is generated through the encounter between a person’s actions and their consequences. The unnecessary person’s actions have no consequences the world registers. Ravi can cook in the kitchen. He can feel the difference between being needed and being allowed to help.

The intergenerational fracture runs deep. Ravi’s mother worked in the fields, in the kitchen, raising her children. Her work organized her life. What does she transmit? The ethic of work, which has no application. The aspiration to provide, which the floor provides. Everything she knows about how to live is organized around a world that no longer exists for her son. She sees the floor and sees comfort and cannot understand why her son is not happy. Her success is his ceiling.

People can serve each other. The neighborly economy. The care economy. The economy of noticing your light was off for three days. This is real and valuable and does not scale, does not address aspiration, does not satisfy the young person who dreamed of becoming something larger.

Does aspiration itself change? Does the generation born on the floor develop different ambition, directed toward mastery rather than advancement, depth rather than height? This is possible. It may also be a story comfortable people tell about the adaptability of less comfortable people.

The floor without meaning is a warehouse. The commons without reciprocity is a waiting room. The state that maintains a population it does not need will treat them the way institutions treat things they maintain but do not need: minimally, efficiently, with decreasing attention. The reservation. The project. The comfortable neglect that is worse than cruelty because it does not have the dignity of conflict. You are not oppressed. You are irrelevant.

The drones are already in the air.