The Hidden Cost of Numbers

Being someone who studies maths, it’s often assumed that I like nothing more than to think about numbers. In reality of course, studying maths is actually one the safest ways to be sure that you’ll never see one, and there’s a part of me which is grateful for this, for what initially might seem to be a pretty dumb reason. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that one of the most damaging traits of modernity is how we think about numbers. Now I know what you’re thinking: “What are you talking about? Surely there are more importa-” and yes, you’re probably right about that, but if you’ve made it this far you may as well continue.

The extent to which culture and political economy interact cannot be overstated. It shouldn’t be too avant-garde a statement to claim that if we lived how they are. So it was under feudalism, so it is today. I don’t think it’s too controversial to claim that under capitalism, prices exist. Prices are interesting because they attach a transcendental quality to something material, and so they elevate a commodity to something greater than its value in use. More interesting still, they conflate the abstract idea of value with the essentially constructed idea of price – in the market, price is value after all. Essentially, we have an economic system whose foundation is (at least in part) built on this interaction of objects and the numbers which both transcend them and define their value. We can take this analysis further – according to Marx, the defining feature of capital as opposed to simple money is its need to grow for its own sake, and so not only is value conflated with number, but to maximise value, the numbers must get bigger.

To the person who lives and breathes the dominant ideology of their time - which is everyone - this “number – value” association in the abstract becomes inescapable in the material. One’s performance in school, for instance, is reduced to a set of numbers which are treated almost as the product of years of labour. This is no coincidence of course: the school system as we know it today was born in and modelled on the mass production lines of the Industrial Revolution, so in a sense it’s completely unsurprising that the outward expression of one’s educational life may as well be in binary. Even before you leave school though, the pervasive culture of testing increasingly encourages students to see themselves as their marks, and in particular to see themselves in reference to the marks of others. This is not at all dissimilar to the state of affairs in social media: Online, your value is thought of in terms of like or follower counts, and the negative psychological effects of viewing yourself in this way are not fully understood. Instagram actually experimented earlier this year with disabling public like counts in response to this, which I think represented a positive move, but they have since been reinstated.

The common denominator of these things is the definition of personal value in terms of numbers, and in particular the ease with which that leads to clear, well-defined goals for self-validation. Basically, it’s a lot easier to aim towards a number for your happiness than it is to aspire to some abstract bullshit about contentment (note that in precisely the same way, it’s easier for companies to aim for profits over broader social goals). The question is, does this ease translate into actual happiness for people? The fact that we often hear about the negative mental health impacts of things like intensive and constant testing implies that probably not, but that begs another question: why not?

The punchline here is that the link between feelings of anxiety and number can partly be put down to the nature of numbers themselves. Numbers possess a cold and alien quality. They are associated with robotic logic and rigidity, so the psychological process of associating one’s own value and success with sets of numbers becomes a process of alienation from the self. Not only that, but the attainment of self-value in this alienated form is totally fleeting and illusory, because the number is ideologically pre-loaded to never be content with stillness – this is the aforementioned nature of capital, and in practice it means that until you let go of the association, you can’t meaningfully be content. In this way, this anxiety can be thought of as intrinsically existential, and it finds its logical basis in the capitalist association between number and value.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying that numbers would only exist under capitalism or anything like that, or that they would only become overused in that context. What I am saying is that under capitalism, numbers take on an interesting role as placeholders of value, and that this role needs to be understood as the weird thing that it is and for the weird things it makes us do. At the end of it all, it’s important for any society to critically evaluate the meaning of its symbols, and that’s just as true about numbers as it is about rambling polemics in Felix.