Something I keep circling around and not quite finding a way to express is that, in contemporary times, the question, "Why does it matter what happens to me, specifically?" is getting harder and harder to answer.
In fact, let's go broader, the question, "Why does it matter what happens to any specific person, object, or idea?" is getting harder to answer.
And in my mind I keep getting sucked into the related idea that modern relationships are highly contingent.
But I don't think that's really quite the nub of the issue.
Something I've thought about in history is how violent monarchies were. The king is always going to be the king, so if he's your political enemy or if he's stupid or tyrannical the only way to solve the problem is to just kill the guy.
King Charles is the King because he's the son of the previous monarch. The "because" in that previous sentence is *not* the same as the "because" in the sentence, "I have a job because I perform the duties well and help the company make money."
Charles, or some medieval monarch, has a Kingship that is in some sense contingent; if he does a bad enough job there might be a revolution or a coup.
But the Kingship cannot be severed from the person; the King's relationship to Kingship is permanent and is a feature of that specific person.
And as a result of that feudal societies take a tremendous amount of interest in what happens to the king.
My relationship to my job, on the other hand, is severable. It is necessary that the company I work for have somebody perform the duties of my job; but it is in a position to treat me as fungible with all other equally skilled workers.
Should I, say, stop showing up to work, they don't have to kill me and all my male heirs, they can just fire me.
What happens to me, specifically, me, Morlock-Holmes, not my demographic, not my country, not people in my religion, but what happens to me, specifically, as an individual, only matters for as long as I can justify it mattering in economic terms.
It has occurred to me that I have not defined what it means for something to "Matter" but in this case it means something like, "Society takes a tangible interest in expending resources to create a certain outcome."
So, like, Market relationships are extremely contingent in certain ways but too much instability is undesirable so there is also a bureacratic system to make things less contingent in one meaning of that term. E.g. we don't have to murder our inept leaders anymore because we have processes to remove them. And it's hard to have a market if I can just shoot you and take your stuff without consequence.
But what both the market and the bureacratic state devalue is the idea that I specifically matter; both tend to treat me as a type. I can get a job if a company can buy my labor for less money than I make for them. I can get food stamps if my income is under a certain level. If I don't meet those thresholds I don't get that stuff, but if I don't apply for a job I don't get it either. If I don't apply for food stamps nobody will particularly notice that I'm going hungry.
What happens to me is important only in so far as I meet certain requirements, and to the extent that I don't meet them there is no particular reason to take any notice of me at all.