A terribly brief look at how I came to appreciate markets
Personal experience? Eternal Truth? Cowardice?
There’s a period of moneymaking from early to mid 2016 that isn’t written anywhere on my resume - if it were, it would be titled something like “Part-Time Plasma Donor”. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to consistently buy strong and disgusting beer while having no other job. I’d wake up in the late afternoon, bike over to the plasma donation center, sit around and hope that my heart rate dipped beneath 100 beats per minute (any higher and you couldn’t donate that day), sit around for an hour while blood was sucked out of my arm while hoping nobody I knew walked in, then bike to the nearest gas station or liquor store to pick up some booze and start drinking as soon as I was alone again. I drank all night, secure in the feeling that everyone else was asleep and in sleeping couldn’t possibly be thinking of me or demanding anything of me, until dawn came and birds sang and I hopefully fell into the even-deeper obliviousness of sleep myself. Then it all happened the same way again, and again, and again, and again.
It’s taken a long time for that association to fade, the one between witnessing dawn and miserably staying up all night. I’ve gotten sober, and in sobriety sought different employment - jobs where I build things, and where I build skills in building things, where the days add up to something - which has also meant getting paid to be on more or less the same schedule as the majority of other people. Sobriety, at least the 12-step variety, is all about countering isolation - discovering and disclosing whatever misery you’re stuck on, focusing on the needs of others, etc. Proactive communication, focusing on the needs of others, being resilient enough to receive difficult feedback - all of these things make it a lot easier to work with you, and make people a lot more willing to pay you more money.
So I experienced the slow, stuttering, uneven climb of social mobility. I built skills, both technical skills and people skills, and the world no longer appeared to be a terrible place where only the terrible were rewarded. I thought that only dead-eyed mediocrities or cackling villains made any money, the villains by being exploitative and the mediocrities by not questioning the villains. But now I found myself telling a different story, one where people at least could in principle succeed - maybe not all the way to the heights of power, but at least enough to be better off than they were in years past. I saw myself as being basically in control of my life and how I showed up, and that if I showed up well that over the long run it would work out in my favor - not out of a beautiful moral order in the world, but out of people’s neutral self-interest to work alongside competent contributors and communicators.
Of course, some people don’t achieve social mobility out of a desire to relieve their inner torment through other-oriented virtue. Some do because they’re just sort of naturally talented and get what they want automatically somehow. Still others rise up the ranks because they are rotten motherfuckers who crave power because they only feel safe when everyone around them is afraid of them.
I’ve come to see business - the mutually-profitable coordination of effort around a common enterprise - as being a great thing to happen in the moral domain, because it forces rotten motherfuckers to develop their talents and contribute to others if they want to accumulate power. This isn’t an endorsement of rotten motherfuckery, it’s just to say that rotten motherfuckery is kind of a permanent feature of the human condition and I’d rather have asshole businesspeople than asshole warlords.
Or, maybe I’m just comfortable now and don’t want to mess with that comfort. In which case, fine - how can we incentivize comfy cowards to nevertheless contribute to other people? Do we want to make comfy cowardice illegal, to purge it from the human condition through social engineering? Or do we want to say “be whatever you are, if you contribute to others it’ll be worth it for you”?
I struggle to ascertain whether or not my reconciliation with market economies is a good thing, since it wasn’t always there. I used to see market economies as very evil things indeed - I even briefly ran a Marxist reading group, one that fizzled out due to lack of attendee interest and because I was no longer able to use exploiter-exploited categories to describe every financial relationship I saw. I slowly got squeezed out, lacking the dedication and imagination to update the critical theories to meet every contradictory experience I faced. My (de)conversion wasn’t an intellectual one - my life and the world just no longer fit the categories I tried to apply.
My past does leave me with some strange feelings, knowing that the me of 10 years ago would hate the me that I am today, even though the me I am today is vastly happier and wiser than I had any hope of being. I don’t know what the ultimate truth of my life is, since in 10 years I could find that everything has changed again. Be that as it may it always serves me to look at the causes and conditions of these changes, and to hope that at at least some of what I find might illuminate life for other people as they travel along their path too.