Commodity
The buying and selling of goods and services is the basis of today’s consumer societies. It is the measure of a country’s gross domestic product; it is the reason we accumulate money and why we go to the store to purchase our food and other needs, instead of making things ourselves or relying on a tribe or family.
People have been buying and selling things for a long time, but this is the first time in history when people buy and sell exclusively, as their only daily activity. For the last 200,000 years of human history, people grew their own food, caught their own meat, and foraged in commons as their basic economic activity. Trading, buying and selling — all of this was a very minor activity.
Today, the reverse is true. No one grows their own food anymore or forages in a commons. Buying and selling is what we do; it is what we are. We sell our labor to our employer, and then we get a paycheck. With that paycheck, we pay the rent and purchase food. We repeat.
Life is governed by this strange word: commodity. We buy commodities, and we sell our labor as a commodity. The word comes from the Latin word commoditas, which means “timeliness” or “convenience.” The American Heritage Dictionary describes a commodity as, “Something useful that can be turned to commercial or other advantage.”
In other words, “Will this make me money?”
People used to insist on self reliance with their economic activities — growing their food, making their furniture, utilizing the commons — because they wanted to be responsible for their own fates. Self reliance brought independence, and independence brought freedom. It didn’t matter if the kingdom changed hands or if the South Sea bubble popped: there would be food on the table and a roof over your head. Life would go on.
And when they had to buy and sell commodities and engage in the types of economic transactions we take for granted today, they would insist on real money, like gold or silver, because you could hold it, you could store it, you could look at it and see with your eyes that it was there, that it would not go away. Paper money was seen as dangerous because it was issued by a government and was a step removed from the natural foundation of wealth. Now, we don’t even shrug when paper money is replaced by electronic money on bank websites, when the Federal Reserve can push a button on a keyboard and issue money to banks over the internet. This would have been unthinkable even fifty years ago.
With the triumph of the commodity, life experience, too, has been commoditized. We all know you can purchase your perfect home, your perfect wedding, your perfect school for your child; but that’s just for beginners. Today, you can fly into outer space without the normally-required decades of training ($20 million) or climb Mount Everest without any prior mountaineering background ($65,000).
What used to be special or unique can now be purchased off the shelf, so that it makes a good cocktail story with your fellow commodity-warriors.
Tit-for-tat is all we understand anymore, even with friendship, even with love. We treat love like a commodity, something to be exchanged instead of a genuine feeling of selfless union. He will give me this if I give him that. This is what too many of us call love, but it is not really love. It is just an exchange, an agreement between the two parties. Men are so angry at women, and women are angry at men, but they are both at fault, both of them are rascals seeking to selfishly exchange instead of selflessly give.
This is why prostitution exists, because sex is a commodity. Today, prostitution is so advanced that your dollar can purchase a few hours of a perfect “girlfriend experience,” ($2000 per hour) so you can even buy the appearance of affection, of what love might feel like. This is the sorry state of love in our society.
This is what every minister at every wedding always says to the couple: your love will run out, but you are swearing an oath to God that you will never leave each other, so you’d better stay together! Or else God will know. This is what love means in today’s world, a promise before God not to leave once the love goes away. The ritual we call the alleged pinnacle of love is a sham, but instead we are happy to go through the motions, say pretty lies when asked to so, and see people chain themselves to a partnership that may foreclose them from love for a long time.
Everything is bought and exchanged, everything must have some value, some use. Even who we talk to, who we love — all of it must have some selfish root.
There is a real insanity behind this, a real deviance that makes people truly insane. There are too many people in therapy, on pills, or engaging in addictive behaviors to certify this world we have created as healthy, as sane, as fostering to human decency and actualization of the human spirit. We accept the commodification of our natural resources, of our personal relationships, and of our deepest human emotions without any thought as to whether there is any alternative, or even whether it’s a good idea. We just accept it, and we suffer for it, and then we go and die a slow and painful death alone in a nursing home, drugged on morphine and wondering why little Timmy doesn’t call anymore.
Self reliance, independence, sharing, love, and freedom: do we know what these words even mean anymore? Because they have nothing to do with our daily activities, nothing to do with the selling of our labor and the possession of wealth. Indeed, these words are hardly even spoken anymore in casual conversation. No one does anything “for their independence,” or for “love” or because they wanted to “share.”
Where are the rebels of the human spirit? Where are the partisans who fight for sanity? Who, today, can reject the commodification of life, the commodification of culture, and call for a return to simpler principles that have nothing to do with buying and selling, with some selfish exchange?
The exchange is everywhere, once you look. You will see the exchange in your interpersonal relationships, in your business relationships, and in the halls of government. You will see friends who aren’t so friendly, lovers who aren’t so loving, businesses that profess kindness when they are anything but, and politicians who talk of the common good when they are agents of privatization. When Congress meets, it chops up more of the shared commons and hands it over to the wealthy, to the corporations, to the monied interests who possess power for ten Earths and not just one.
Even today your thoughts and dreams, your creative works, your desire for music and literature — all those things will one day be bought and sold on a market of “intellectual” property, commoditized so that every single moment of your life, every single thought in your brain can be assigned value, made useful, and potentially turned into a profit. This is the dream of many people in power today, and they are hard to work to enclose the commons of your mind so that they can buy and sell it like a bad subprime mortgage.
We commodify so that we can possess, so that we can control. This is why we have commodified all of Nature and destroyed commons, enclosed plains, chopped up forests, denied people the right to forage: we want to control Nature and make money from it. This is why we want to commodify creative content, why the RIAA sues single mothers, why movie studios fear the internet and digital cameras: they want to control the content and make money from it.
The rules of Nature are very different. In Nature, it is not the commodity that governs, but the cycle. There is the water cycle, the Krebs cycle, the seasonal cycle as the Earth revolves around the sun, the countless cycles of countless forms of life. There is a pattern and a harmony that is not dependent on whether there might be an interested buyer. Rather, the harmony exists from mere fulfillment of the cycle itself.
The Gregorian calendar, the calendar we use on a daily basis, is a measure of one such cycle: the cycle of the Earth as it revolves around the sun. Older, perhaps wiser peoples possessed many calendars, not just one. They were fascinated by the different cycles in Nature and wanted to catalogue them all as a way of understanding a reality, to discover some deeper purpose. Calendars were created to measure the cycle of the moon, the appearance of the star Sirius, and even the 25,000 year cycle of the Earth as it wobbles on its axis. The Mayans used a number of calendars, including ones with a 260-day cycle, a 365-day cycle, and a 584-day cycle based on Venus. The intersections created by their calendars created auspicious dates and festivals. The ancient Hindus calculated their calendars based on trillions of human years. Just one day in the life of Brahma, the Prime Creator, is 4.32 billion years (the approximate age of our sun, incidentally), a figure which certainly puts things in a very different perspective.
In our modern world, we shun this cyclical view of life and have replaced it with a perspective that is defined by a strict and narrow linearity. A linear world view can measure a world based on commodities. A cyclical view cannot do this.
Under this linear model, age is something to be feared because it leads only to death. As you get older, you can’t buy and sell as much as when you are young. Age is a hindrance, something to be rejected, avoided, Botoxed out. We see youth as a precious resource that is slowly stripped away like a coy mistress until we die slow and painfully in a nursing home.
Under this linear model, wealth must be constantly accumulated and hoarded. Happiness is measured by a climbing Dow Jones index, because more buying and selling is better, richer is wiser, and the expansion of debt the goal of the state and of society.
Under this linear model, marriage and children are a necessity, not a choice. Without marriage, without children, buying and selling becomes a useless activity because you can’t take your wealth with you once you die. There must be some purpose. No matter if your wife hates you or your children piss away the estate:Â the property must be given a chance to survive. The buying and selling must continue, even post mortem.
Under this linear model, the state is needed to create rules related to property, to prevent people from fighting over the fruits of their commodification, the profits of their buying and selling. Government must be robust, with powerful courts and many police officers, because in a world based on the selfish exchange of goods and services, people will never act in the common good but only in their narrow self interest.
This is why, in the West especially, people are no longer individuals. They have traded their individuality for pre-arranged archetypes based on buying and selling, on commodification. Everything is an exchange, everything must be a bargain, tit-for-tat. Everything must be useful, or have value.
Like a preconfigured computer shipped with a sub-standard operating system, people who are alive today do nothing but execute some mindless program of social conformity, behaving in ways that reflect this selfish exercise of commodification. Everyone buys the same iPod, likes the same mindless movies, reads the same pandering journalists, votes for the same spineless political party. The generation gap has been closed, and the rebellion crushed.
Wouldn’t it be nice to do things because it would make you a freer person? Or because you wanted to share something with someone? Or because you felt love and wanted to give a bit of that love to someone else? How interesting those motivations would be! They would be very different than the motives we typically see.
Ironically, these are the motives that governed the human tribes and community groups that learned to live with one another for hundreds of thousands of years. Groups that shared survived and prospered; selfish groups disbanded or were destroyed by a whimsical and sometimes chaotic Nature. Teamwork meant you could catch more food, plant more crops, do a bit more foraging. You could share what you possessed, and it would benefit everyone.
It was here, in these groups that shared, where dancing was born, and festivals, and holidays, and yearly feasts. This is where calendars were developed — not one, but tens or even hundreds — which catalogued the cycles of life and death, the joys and sorrows of human existence, the soothing breeze of real love, the cultivation of real friendship. This was a world where government wasn’t so invasive, wasn’t so big, wasn’t so intrusive, because it just wasn’t needed. People didn’t fight so much because there wasn’t so much to fight about. This was a world very different from our own, one where the commodity was not so important.
Indeed: maybe the commodity, the buying and selling of things, just isn’t that important. Maybe it’s not so crucial for the Dow to keep rising, for wrinkles and gray hairs to make their mark, for love to come and go as it tends to do. Maybe it’s better to sit outside on a nice spring day and enjoy the sunshine and remember that the spring turns to summer, summer turns to fall, and the winter gets cold and lonely before the spring returns again. Maybe if more people did this, if more people could think cyclically, and not so much in a straight line, we could see the return of dancing, and festivals, and holidays, and yearly feasts where people could share their bounties and celebrate in times of plenty, and depend on each other in times of famine. For that, too, is a cycle.
That would make life a bit more livable, a bit more civilized, a bit more humane. It would make this world a place of real joy.
In a world of freedom, the real heroes are those who are free. In a world of self reliance, the real heroes are the trail-blazers of self reliance. In a world of love, the real heroes are the kind, loving souls who meditate under the Bodhi tree or spend 40 days in the desert or drink the Hemlock so that you and I don’t have to, but can just follow their example and cultivate a bit more peace and quiet on this rough and tumble Earth. Freedom is not bought or sold, love cannot be bargained. By definition, sharing is never a selfish activity. These things cannot be commoditized. They are needed more than ever.
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