In the liberal democratic imagination, equality is a principle, a promise, a pillar of legitimacy. But in practice, we live under regimes defined by imbalance. Some people have too much, most have far too little. Some understand the rules, others are kept from even knowing they exist. Some have time to shape the world, while others are barely surviving within it.
This is not accidental. It’s not new. But it is intensifying.
What we face today is not just inequality in specific domains—wealth gaps, education gaps, opportunity gaps—but pervasive asymmetry: a total condition in which every dimension of power is distributed unequally, and that inequality reinforces itself. The result is a political order that no longer needs to announce itself as authoritarian—because its asymmetries already do the work.
I. Wealth and Literacy
Wealth asymmetry is the foundation. Not just in raw accumulation—but in how it structures time, choice, safety, and influence. The ultra-rich don’t merely possess more money—they purchase exemption from the rules that govern everyone else. They acquire access to politicians, manipulate media narratives, and outsource the externalities of their decisions onto others.
But the more insidious asymmetry may be literacy—not just the ability to read, but the ability to comprehend and navigate systems. The systems that manage finance, law, education, or AI are cloaked in technical language, legalese, or proprietary abstraction. Understanding them requires a kind of elite fluency—one that is systematically withheld from most people.
We call this “functional illiteracy” when people struggle with forms, terms, and platforms that structure their lives. But we should call it what it is: designed disempowerment.
“Reading the word is not enough; one must also read the world.” — Paulo Freire
In a world increasingly governed by code—legal, computational, bureaucratic—those without access to critical literacy are made dependent, invisible, and disposable. Literacy becomes a dividing line between those who shape the system, and those who are shaped by it.
II. Time as Class War
Time, like money and knowledge, is not distributed equally.
The difference between someone who controls their schedule and someone whose time is scheduled for them is a difference of class, power, and possibility. To live without time—without slack, recovery, or planning—is to live in permanent precarity.
The rise of just-in-time labor, gig platforms, and precarious contracts has created an illusion of flexibility while in fact deepening asymmetry. Employers or platforms may algorithmically dictate when and how someone works, while workers must remain constantly available, yet never secure.
This is a form of temporal discipline that reshapes the rhythms of life to serve the needs of capital and control. It is time theft disguised as hustle culture.
Those with time autonomy—founders, funders, policymakers—gain not just freedom but foresight. They plan, rest, strategize. Those without it scramble, react, and burn out.
As Silvia Federici reminds us, this too is gendered. Unpaid care work, often shouldered by women, is the hidden infrastructure beneath paid labor. The asymmetry is both economic and existential.
III. Health and Biopolitics
If wealth and time are unequally distributed, so too are health and care.
There is a direct relationship between class and morbidity. Poverty kills. So does stress, pollution, overwork, and under-treatment. The body becomes a site where asymmetry is not only experienced, but enforced.
Some people access private care, concierge medicine, and life-extending interventions. Others wait weeks for appointments, avoid costs, or never even get a diagnosis. Geography, race, and status determine outcomes.
And this is not merely about who lives and who dies. It is about who is managed and who is free.
Ivan Illich wrote about how medical institutions, like schools and churches, function to regulate populations. Today, algorithmic triage, biometric tracking, and digital health passports are part of a biopolitical regime that surveils and disciplines the poor, while insulating the rich.
Health, like time and literacy, becomes a resource extracted from the many to benefit the few. Wellness is a luxury, illness a sentence.
IV. The War on Understanding
Perhaps the most corrosive asymmetry is epistemic: the battle over who gets to define truth, and who is denied the tools to understand their own conditions.
In an era flooded with disinformation, shallow content, and synthetic media, the powerful can afford discernment. They pay for expert analysis, personalized feeds, and human intermediaries. Everyone else is left to drown in noise.
This is not simply a crisis of trust—it is a tactic of control. Strategic ignorance is cultivated. Confusion is manufactured. The capacity for critical thinking is diminished by exhaustion and distraction.
“The public is bombarded with information, but starved of meaning.” — Neil Postman
Meanwhile, institutions that once offered shared knowledge—schools, libraries, journalism—are defunded, discredited, or captured. Expertise is commodified, while dissent is dismissed as conspiracy or noise.
This asymmetry enables what James C. Scott called state legibility: the simplification of complex lives into data points that can be taxed, monitored, or policed. But people, unlike data, resist.
Asymmetry Is the System
The myth of liberal democracy insists on equality of opportunity. But the reality of modern authority is built on inequality of access. To money. To knowledge. To time. To care.
These asymmetries are not separate. They are interlocking. A person who is poor is more likely to be sick. A person who is sick is more likely to fall behind. A person who falls behind is less likely to be literate. And so the loop reinforces itself—privatized, digitized, and depoliticized.
The future of authority will be defined by how we confront—or fail to confront—these structures of pervasive asymmetry.
To build a democratic society, we must demand not just inclusion in the existing system, but a reconfiguration of its foundations. Symmetry cannot be symbolic. It must be material, temporal, epistemic, and embodied.
Until then, inequality will remain the infrastructure of authority.
