RE: The Story of Money: The Myth of Barter
Quick addendum: A few additional things to chew on.
In every known pre-industrial culture in the world, gift economies are hugely present. They take many shapes and forms. But in nearly all cases, you are surrounded by people that you've known your entire life, and are likely to know for the rest of your life, assuming they don't die before you do.
In these situations, if someone needs something...you give it to them. This is your insurance policy, if you have more then you need anyway, by giving it to whoever needs it, you're tying yourself into a social net that supports whomever needs supporting. This really appears to be the natural state of human communities. They care of each other.
It's like walking next door to ask your neighbor for a few eggs or a cup of sugar (WHICH I LOVE DOING BY THE WAY!!!!). If you offer to pay them for it, the whole thing feels gross really quickly. However, you accept their generosity, you remember and appreciate it, and you bring them something nice at a later date. This is the stuff culture is made of. You can't become close to people where you have no debt. If you settle all your debts, you are strangers, you have nothing for each other.
It's the WAY you are indebted to them, and they to you that makes life. Don't settle your debts, be indebted beautifully, and you will always have a place in the world.
We'll approach this more in depth in a future post.
You've put a tremendous amount of effort into this post and it deserves to endure as a pinnacle of scholarship!
Funny, your description of different barter practices made me think of the book The Gift by Lewis Hyde, which despite the way it is advertised on the cover is really more of an economics treatise. And then you mentioned gifting economies in the first comment.
Which is kind of what we've got going on here with Steemit, isn't it? Our voting power builds up throughout the day and then we build value and community by exchanging it freely with those we admire.
Excellent effert ... nicely put.
mmmhmm! I'll check that out, Thanks Winston!
Hahaha! It's true!! It has a lot of parallels to gift economy. You want to know a secret?
When I think of Steemit as gift economy, I feel super happy about it, but sometimes my brain gets knocked into the rut of thinking about it as "What am I getting from it?" And thats usually when I feel kinda crappy about it all, and critical...I try to keep things in the first place, but you know...every day is different.
There's a balance.
I came here thinking, "I'm just going to write the best I can and enjoy reading a bunch of interesting people."
Within a day I was like, "Only 10 votes on my post? What am I doing wrong?"
I think as long as we can keep our focus on giving, and treat the (wildly inconsistent) payouts as an occasional gift, we'll do okay.
Yeah!!! That is totally the deal isn't it. It's all about the frame of reference.
Yeah, give until you have nothing left and then expect the next man to give to you, that's sustainable.
hmmm. perhaps this one suites you then?
I take from no one, I exchange freely. Perhaps not always on equal terms, but fundamentally my actions are done with mutual consent.
Aye, I respect that mentality. Also, it would seem that there are some components of our global cult of industry that take everything they can get from the land, and the people who live there, often without consent, or anything resembling compensation. I mean, in the US, our entire country was taken largely from people who were well-meaning enough to attempt to share it, but systemically they were pried off of the most valuable places, and murdered, starved, and really rent into the ground.
And, it's not unusual, every place in the world that has people living there, was once occupied by different people before them. It's still happening today.
I don't speak for condemnation, but rather acknowledgement, there are hundreds of tribes of indigenous people in the amazon that have been persecuted, silenced, murdered, and god knows what by Chinese oil companies. They've destroyed vast distances of water sheds with faulty pipelines and spills...caused unmeasurable damage and suffering to people, animals, and the other beings there.
Those methods of acquiring cheap oil funds Chinese industry, which is unimaginably intertwined with every industrial nation on the planet. Was the final transaction we make at the grocery store done free and clear in the spirit of mutual consent? Probably.
But what about the extensive chain of financial/economic hegemony that must always extract value, must always keep growing, in order to support such commercial endpoints as a store, a business?
We are inextricably tied to such things.
The idea of well meaning indigeonus americans who tried to share there land is unfortunatly misplaced. The truth is that European colonizers were resisted almost everywhere they went and were only tolerated in so far as it either benefited a particular tribe or they had no choice. It is more accurate to think of the settling of north america as a long series of wars, but one that was doomed from the start for the natives as they were no match numerically or technologically for the Europeans.
Guess it depends who you listen to :P The bigger reality as I'm aware of it is that 90%+ of all of the natives were wiped out within 50 years of contact by European diseases.
Yes, definatly
And that mutual consent is all that matters. In an exchange each party values the other good MORE than their own, otherwise there would be no exchange.