The scarcity of time, the artificial scarcity of virtue—this is how the world keeps itself from falling apart while ensuring that it never truly holds together. The dominant ethic is not just market fundamentalism but the slow, grinding logic of triage, where only the most urgent, the most spectacular, the most 'fixable' suffering is deemed worthy of attention, while the quiet, ambient suffering of the everyday is treated as background noise.

And this is precisely how the system reproduces itself. If only the crises matter, then the underlying conditions that produce the crises never have to be addressed. If only the exceptional are cared for, then care itself remains exceptional—never a right, always a contingency. The managerial mindset ensures that suffering is treated like a technical problem, a defect to be patched, rather than an indictment of the structure itself.

Eisenstein’s insight about the artificial scarcity of time, patience, and attention is crucial here. When understanding, attention and virtue are framed as finite resources, their distribution becomes a zero-sum game, reinforcing a brutal calculus: who deserves understanding, who is expendable, who is worth the investment. And, as Hedva notes, this calculus is always racialized, classed, and ableist at its core. The result is not just the exclusion of the unproductive but the active production of expendability—whole populations and ways of being rendered waste. Sandel’s invocation of Kenneth Arrow—this idea that we must not 'recklessly' use up our scarce reserves of altruism—feels like a final absurdity. As if care were a finite mineral deposit. As if the real threat were too much concern rather than the routinized, structured abandonment of so many.