Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 05:43:10 JST HeavenlyPossum

   In my town, there is a medieval hospital—not for treating the sick, but for housing the indigent.

   It was built in the 15th century and it still serves to house the poor. A wealthy merchant endowed it.

   I don’t know why he did it, though. Maybe he was motivated by genuine concern for the poor. Maybe he was hoping to save his immortal soul through charitable works. Maybe he wanted to impress a romantic interest or embarrass a rival merchant. Maybe it was a combination of these things or something else entirely.

   Human motivation is, despite what you’ve undoubtedly heard, enormously complex, multifaceted, and often very opaque (even for ourselves and our own motivation).

   The fact remains that this merchant did something I’ve been told is impossible, could never happen: he did something for nothing.

   1/

   • Embed this notice
     gnutelephony (gnutelephony@floss.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 05:43:06 JST gnutelephony

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum I relate thru generosity but not by greed, so I do find it very hard to relate at all to most people in this country. I have however only very recently come to terms with the idea and need to completely refuse to be generous or relating to selfish, cruel, greedy people and societies.

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 05:43:07 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     This is a common thread in much of Graeber’s work. In his essay “Army of Altruists,” Graeber argues that altruism and egoism are far from natural expressions of competing human motivation. Rather, “egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature” that historically emerged around the same time as both the great monotheistic religions and the increasingly profit-oriented economies of the ancient Near East. We might speculate that the idea of separate spheres of life—sacred and profane, value versus values, generosity versus greed—is an ex post facto justification for those market economies, not their cause.

     Human beings are motivated by far more than greed and generosity:

     “When we are dealing not with strangers but with friends, relatives, or enemies, a much more complicated set of motivations will generally come into play: envy, solidarity, pride, self-destructive grief, loyalty, romantic obsession, resentment, spite, shame, conviviality, the anticipation of shared enjoyment, the desire to show up a rival, and so on. These are the motivations impelling the major dramas of our lives that great novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky immortalize but that social theorists, for some reason, tend to ignore.”

     7/

     https://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/army-of-altruists/

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 05:43:08 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     In any case, we know of many examples of people “doing something for nothing” in the sense of receiving no transactional gains from the people they’re interacting with.

     Maybe we can’t sustain a complex global economy purely on the basis of motivations like “prestige-seeking” or “conviviality.” Surely, they play some role—probably more than most of us realize—but maybe they’re not enough to run the global system that makes it possible for me to be typing these words at you right now.

     And…that’s ok. In the same essay, Graeber argues that all of these forms of exchange already exist in every single society, at least in some nascent form. We might be communists with our close relations and commercial traders with distant strangers we don’t ever expect to meet again, with lots of variations in between. If you buy a round at the pub, with the expectation that your mates will buy the next round, are you giving a gift, conducting a commercial transaction, or something in between?

     5/

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 05:43:08 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Graeber argues that what we call “gift economies” or “market economies” are not totalizing conceptual universes. We’re talking about *dominant* economic institutions and, perhaps just as important, the prevailing way in which people in these societies conceive of themselves. Many capitalist ideologues conceive of themselves purely in terms of rational economic calculation even as they experience generosity (did their parents charge them for care when they were infants?) and relationship-building (do they ever exchange gifts with loved ones at the holidays?).

     Material conditions are clearly important for determining our social relations. But how we think about ourselves—or rather, how we’ve been taught and indoctrinated to think about ourselves—is also vitally important as well. If we can directly experience multiple kinds of economic interaction but still somehow conclude that we will never “do something for nothing,” then there is clearly more at work than simple mechanical processes of base and superstructure.

     6/

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 05:43:09 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     You undoubtedly experience many of these “something for nothing” moments in your daily life. Maybe you’re at work and ask a coworker to pass you a tool—without your coworker expecting some kind of transactional reward from you in return.

     Graeber notes that every society features some level of this “everyday communism,” but they vary from society to society and from person to person and from interaction to interaction.

     Maybe we’re more likely to see these kinds of unreciprocated gifts in smaller-scale, face-to-face societies, and less often in larger societies with many more impersonal interactions between strangers. In those societies, maybe we’re more likely to witness what Graeber calls the “heroic gift.” These are situations in which people with power give away wealth to bolster their social status and prestige.

     Think the potlatches of the indigenous communities of the northwest American Pacific coast, in which elites competed to hand out as much material wealth as they could. Or the classical Athenian liturgy, in which wealthy elites competed to make the largest donations to state finances. Or possibly that medieval merchant at the top of the thread.

     4/

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 05:43:10 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Of course, this merchant got *something,* some satisfaction, from doing this, or else, presumably, he wouldn’t have done it.

     But this merchant did spend an enormous amount of money to purchase the land, hire the laborers to construct it, and fund an endowment that has kept the hospital in operation for centuries. At the end of all that, he gave it away, for free.

     That is to say, he did not engage in a commercial transaction with the residents of the hospital. They paid him nothing. Whatever benefit the merchant gained from this endeavor, he did not gain it by exchanging or trading with the residents of the hospital.

     It’s a trope in capitalist modernity that human beings are naturally greedy, that we’re acquisitive and have infinite hedonic wants. We will not, I’ve been told over and over, work “for free,” something that proponents of capitalism see as a slam-dunk case against anti-capitalist systems that lack the incentives of wages and wealth.

     2/

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 05:43:10 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Material gain is obviously a powerful motivator, but it is far from the only motivator, and probably not the primary one behind most human action.

     Back in 2014, the late great David Graeber wrote a paper titled “On the moral grounds of economic relations:
     A Maussian approach,” in which he attempted to categorize the various kinds of “gifts” according to the varying logics of hierarchy.

     The most basic kind of gift, he argued, is one that conveyed no obligation of reciprocity. This he called “everyday communism,” the sort of mutual aid or conviviality that underpins all of human sociality.

     Sometimes, the need is great enough: perhaps you see a child fall onto the train tracks and jump down to save them without thinking about reward.

     Sometimes, the cost is low enough: perhaps a stranger asks you for directions and you provide them without asking for payment.

     Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of ensuring the pleasure of someone’s company.

     3/

     https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=5650241602027561938&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1700850582575&u=%23p%3DtCCV-io5rUkJ

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Monday, 27-Nov-2023 20:44:28 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     PS: if you enjoyed this thread, you can always buy me a coffee here. Everyone gets a little everyday communism, as a treat.

     https://www.buymeacoffee.com/heavenlypossum

     9/end

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Monday, 27-Nov-2023 20:44:28 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     ADDENDUM:

     A few people read this thread and took away from it the conclusion that many people are generous and altruistic, but some people are greedy, and that it’s this latter minority that’s the cause of our current predicament.

     I would encourage everyone to consider that we are all “greedy” and all “altruistic.” That is: we all contain competing motivations to selfishly self-aggrandize ourselves at the expense of others and to cooperate generously to the benefit of all. Some of us might have inclinations towards one or the other, but we all contain both motivations.

     The distinction between altruism and greed also breaks down when we recognize that generous cooperation *also* benefits the cooperator. In many important senses, the distinction between greed and altruism is false and illusory.

     The problem we face is not one of individual motivation. It is one of systemic and institutional constraints and motivations. Under capitalism, generosity can be a *death sentence* if giving away your possessions or labor freely costs you your own access to sustenance.

     10/9 (the end for real, for now)

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Monday, 27-Nov-2023 20:44:29 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     We could return to our medieval merchant with his hospital and ask: was he behaving egoistically or altruistically? And the answer must be: yes.

     Yes, he was gaining some personal satisfaction. Yes, he was doing it by giving away vast amounts of wealth to the poor. We routinely seek personal satisfaction through generosity, kindness, sharing. There is no contradiction, because humans are not one-dimensional robots who have to choose between psychopathic selfishness and Ayn Rand’s caricature of altruism as destructive selflessness.

     The tension is purely artificial. If we remove the fictional divide between value and values, between the social and the economic, and recognize them are inseparable parts of the same whole, then we experience no contradiction.

     Socialism is not impossible because of some imagined human nature of greed. We do not have socialism today because of violence by the state and the capital class, but also because of stories about ourselves that so many of us have been convinced to believe.

     8/