Magdalena Stojmanović-Konstantinov
In all known societies throughout history, inequality has been present, and the more complex societies become in their structure of macro, meso and micro relations, the more pronounced inequality becomes. In essence, science fiction through the scenario of “buying” and “selling” time shows that this possible occurrence from the future reveals the inequality in society. But it is not far from the current events and circumstances, which the modern busy man hardly notices.
For example, the fact that rich people have more access to medicines, modern laboratories, do not work in mines, have the opportunity to live in an uncontaminated environment, take care of their mental health and pay for expensive sessions, go on vacation several times and eat healthy with the help of a nutritionist, while that layer of citizens who survives on the minimum wage does not have the same accessibility, this is not only reflected in the quality of life but often also in its length.
In the future, when time would potentially become a hypothetically tradable currency, that difference in lifespan would be more apparent. But this is only the premise of a science fiction scenario, which paints a picture of what would happen if time became a currency. The second implication of this scenario is – how important freedom is in conditions of inequality. What is the quality of life and the perception of it if we are aware that we have five more years to live, and what happens if we know that we have another hundred years to live or possibly we are infinite?
Martin Heidegger says that time is closely related to the perception of the value of human life through the perspective of time. It is finitude as a human mirror that gives rise to the need for the design of human life. The fact that man is aware that he is finite and that life has an end makes him make decisions, be creative and struggle to add meaning to things and his actions.
Henri Bergson distinguishes between “measurable time”, which can be measured on a clock, and lived time, which we experience as an intuitive continuity of consciousness. According to Bergson, freedom has nothing to do with mechanical time – in the sense: I have another hour of rest or half an hour break – but with the intuitive understanding of the continuity of consciousness, which makes each of us unique wholes and the possibility to connect the same self from ten years ago with the current self, even though we have added 20 kilos, wrinkles on our face or changed the color of our hair.
One of the most interesting theses on the relationship between time and freedom in philosophy is given by Walter Benjamin. He says that “historical time” is fractured, not linear time, and then when there is a break in continuity, freedom occurs. In a psychological sense, it is that moment when we want to “clean up with the old” image of ourselves and turn over a new leaf, that is, a psychological beginning.
Paul Ricker believes that the act of freedom is born in the telling of one’s own timeline. The possibility to present ourselves as a character in a scenario, with our own past, choices and plans, is the clearest act of freedom.
This is why, when science fiction considers time as a currency, it uses a number of philosophical concepts. In that case, she not only talks about the disproportion in the dosage of meaning in human life, conditioned by its finitude, but also about freedom, that is, it asks the key question: Would freedom have any meaning at all if man were immortal?
