Sunday’s ramble into dark corners of mythography was triggered by yet another authoritative assertion that the Harvest Lord used to be a bloody sacrifice. But it was also, more subconsciously, inspired by much of the reading I’ve been doing in the blogosphere lately where many people are wrestling with questions of who we are. What is our nature? What are we really like at the core? Are humans good beings? That is, do we play nice and share and take life as it comes and all the other things we naturally do as children? Or are we bad people? The self-serving, psychopathic narcissists that the economy requires from its market. Because, among other things like causation and recompense, this has bearing on whether or not we will “make it” as a species through this mess created by the market economy.
The blogosphere has very dark views…
This is largely due to the limitations of their view of humanity. They are writers. They come from a class of privilege and leisure. They have little experience with lifeways outside that class. And that class is the same very small part of humanity that creates and maintains and benefits from this market economy. That is, the blogosphere comes from a place of self-serving, status-chasing, short-term decision making, transactionally-driven assholes. Not the best view of human nature. Not human nature at its average. I would argue not even real human nature, except for a very small subset of that very small class. (Those perched the pinnacle of the pyramid, well above the blogosphere…)
Someone was talking about the disconnect between what “we know about human nature” and the humans we encounter in our daily lives. The ways of being that we embody are rarely like homo economicus. But, this person seemed to say, for the economy to work homo economicus needs to exist, it needs to be all of us… or at least a large number of us. Of course, that simply isn’t true. Because the economy is not dependent on a lot of people with money to spend on our selfish wants. It is driven by a lot of money being spent (and a lot of bodies unwillingly enslaved to servicing that monetary flow) which is not the same thing at all. It began with more individuals with less money, perhaps… though the spenders were never a large percentage of the global population, nor even a majority percentage of the market. But that is no longer the case, if it ever was. Now, the monetary flow is exclusively in the hands of a very small part of humanity, and yet the market churns on. The market seemingly works without much of a market…
So, it is not the case that the market’s functioning is a reflection on who we are and how we choose to behave, how we meet our needs. We do not need to be homo economicus for the market to thrive.
Because a frightfully large portion of the economy is not serving any of us, not meeting any of our needs, not even wanted by the vast majority of us. It is not us driving with our spending. It hardly involves any human decision-making on spending at all. It is automatic trading transactions, administration of finance, insurance, real estate trading. It is the vast machine that feeds into policing and inflicting violence on each other. Increasingly, it is the billions spent on patching over disasters and collecting “data”. Monetary flow and thus GDP — and what we calculate to be average participation in this economy — are not measures of real life economy, not indications of what we are deciding, not gauges of how we behave, not who we are.
The fact that the economy is faltering now is indication of the vanishingly small number of bodies it serves. Even with all the vast flow of unnecessary monetary exchange, exchange that meets no bodily needs of any kind, the market for real things purchased through market mechanisms is simply too small now. And real things are still the basis for trade. All that unnecessary exchange is built on the real economy and there isn’t enough real economy any more. Too few people can afford to be a part of it.
That, and the fact that real things that can be produced are also diminishing because of depletion and degradation.
But if this were simply a problem of diminishing resources — less of the kinds of stuff we’ve been using to meet human needs — then the market would, in fact as in theory, shift to meet those needs in some other fashion. Human needs are fairly constant and predictable. A market designed to cater to those needs should be responsive to this constant demand and flexible enough to meet it in whatever fashion it can. As there are eight billion of us, meeting the needs of all those bodies adds up lots of monetary flow, a very strong market. (Though more resource use than the planet could ever support…) But that is not the case, is it… Are your needs being met despite increasing degradation and decreasing resource supply? Nope… Not through the market, I’d wager. Because that has never been the case. The market is not designed to meet the needs of all humanity. It is not created to meet human needs. It is designed to enable a very small part of humanity to take huge profits from the world, and this can only happen if most of the world is excluded from the market. We can’t be a part of it for it to work well. It has no interest in taking care of us. It is outside of us.
So, I would say that market behavior, the personality of homo economicus, does not represent all human nature.
I would ask these people who don’t understand why they don’t seem to know homo economicus in their real lives to instead consider the real life around them. How we mostly live. What we mostly want. How we mostly behave to meet those wants. I would wager that they will quickly come to the conclusion that homo economicus is a rather unbelievable fiction, not real, not human. Homo economicus does not have human needs or dreams or wants. Homo economicus is no body, living in no place. Homo economicus is not us.
What are your needs? Can you meet them through transactional relationship? Mostly, no, you can’t. You have need of connection, love, joy, and safety for body and mind. You need to breathe. You need light and darkness for waking and sleeping. This is all outside economics. You also need water… and before you say that you pay for that, consider what you are paying for and mostly who you are paying. Your water bill is paying for the infrastructure that brings clean water to you, not the production of water itself. True, your water bill is increasingly being paid to privateering corporations in the “developed” world, but it began as a collective endeavor to provide safe water to the community. And the majority of water bills are still paid to that collective, to a public utility. This is not transactional economics. It is us taking care of us, meeting our own needs as a community.
But anyway…
You also need food and shelter. This is where the market comes closest to intruding on needs. And, make no mistake, it is an intrusion, and maybe an illusion. For it does not meet those needs even where it is touching upon those needs.
Aside from rent, shelter is a need that is met through transaction relatively few times in life. Which is why the renting economy is growing and why the shelters provided by that rent are becoming less viable as shelter. Rent only works as a profit-making endeavor, as a market-driving project, if more is being paid to the property owner than the property owner is spending to create and maintain the property. So once a rentier owns enough property, there is little else done to that property in the way of spending. Except perhaps to continue to subdivide it to wrest more rent from it. But it’s generally the rule that once you own property, you stop spending money. And most property was sucked up by the rentier class long ago. Yet rents still go up… because to increase its profits, the rentier must increase the rents. Thus, rents go up every year. The amount of money flowing through that market increases. Yet the needs met, the shelter provided, is a constant. So this increase in monetary flow is a false measure of the rent economy’s ability to meet needs — other than those of the rentier class.
As to the few who can still acquire shelter outside this rental system — within the “developed” world, anyway, those places where you can’t live wherever you happen to be — purchases of homes tend to be singular. We are told that “we” move around and buy new homes relatively frequently. The average American moves a dozen times, they say. But this does not mean that the average American buys a new house a dozen times… Most of those moves are between rented spaces. And I would guess that the data is probably flawed, reflecting the sort of people who are surveyed — themselves from or adjacent to the privileged class — not actual average people. Most people in my life don’t move that much. Even my peripatetic father has not moved that much in his very long life. Though I will say that urban renters do move more… because they are constantly being forced to move on to find affordable rent.
In reality, it being very costly and difficult to move in so many ways, most who own homes don’t move frequently, do not buy that many homes in their lifetime, do not feed into the market through meeting their bodily need for shelter. Few people, home-owners and renters alike, move willingly because moving is hell. It is disruptive. It is complicated. It is quite often impossible to fit a move within school or job constraints. You lose your neighbors, often your friendships. You have to learn new places and find new ways to be. These are not things that sedentary humans like. So those of us who are not wanderers by nature are highly reluctant to buy new homes, to participate in that market
On the other hand… those of us who are wanderers are increasingly finding it impossible to be wanderers, to finance those moves within the housing market. With property values being driven relentlessly upwards by the rentier class’s need to wrest more profit from a constant supply of goods, buying my home today would now cost me nearly an entire decade of all the money I could possibly earn in that decade. And my home is relatively cheap. I can’t afford to move anywhere else…
No, we are not mobile people these days. Of the people I know, very few can afford to move. I would wager that most of the people you know also can’t finance a new home. We are not driving that market…
What the more privileged among us do do is refinance, turn that house into borrowed money. And that does feed into the economy… but it rarely meets a need, not even for shelter. A shiny new kitchen does incur many transactional relationships, much money flowing, beginning with the mortgage itself. But it does not meet any bodily needs any better than the old kitchen. And… again… few of us now can afford to participate in those transactions. I doubt I would qualify for a home equity loan these days, and I am fairly wealthy. But look around at the homes near you. How many are need of paint or have roof tiles missing? How many have hacked-together supports holding up sagging porches? How many have plastic on the windows to keep the winter cold out? That is the average home around you. And that represents the average ability to participate in the market forms of meeting shelter.
So, shelter is generally not a bodily need that is being met through the market — though the market is taking vast flows of money from jiggering around the financing, mostly by the rentier class. Which is a very small number of bodies…
Now, let’s look at food. You often encounter the assertion that we would not eat if the economy fell apart… But consider your life… Consider where your food actually comes from.
Yes, processed food is entirely market driven. Yes, it will disappear with the dying market. Yes, that is what homo economicus eats… It flows all over the planet, driving up monetary flow in its wake. It supports huge corporations, whole industries. The lands that feed into this system are vast. But is it feeding you? Largely… no.
Even if you shop exclusively in a supermarket and buy a lot of packages, your main nutrition is still coming from small local supply networks which do not involve much monetary flow. The fruit and veg you buy are low cost and relatively low transport even in food desert urban areas. Low cost, because there is little processing to fresh produce, few ways to increase the sale price, few things done intermediate to harvest and sale that increase monetary transactions. Low transport, because fresh produce goes bad… It can’t be transported vast distances and still be nutritionally viable… or edible… or sellable…
That’s even more true of meat and dairy. Unless it is processed into some preserved form, like tinned fish or packaged sausages or the huge industry that is yogurt these days, most of it is relatively cheap and not feeding into the market all that greatly. Because it will go bad if it spends too long in transport, and there isn’t much happening to it in between harvest and sale to generate monetary flow.
Carbohydrates appear a bit closer to the market… At least superficially… They are the principal ingredient in most processed foods. They are easy to store for long periods. They are, in fact, the foundation of the market economy. Grains are the original market. Growing and selling grain is and always has been how the market grows profit. But is that what you are eating? Is that feeding you?
Somewhat?
First, consider the lands that are planted in grains. How much of that is actually feeding you? How much is feeding no body whatsoever? Here are some statistics (from Wikipedia, not vouching for precision, but the big picture is probably accurate). Over half of all corn grown in the US — which is still the largest producer of corn in the world — goes to “exports”. Most of these will be processed in other countries, mostly Asian, and then sold back to the US. Another third goes to US livestock feed and ethanol production. I suspect a large portion of the exported corn also goes to feed foreign livestock which is then processed and sold back to the US. Of course, the ethanol production feeds no body… The final 15% of corn grown in the US, according to this data, represents all US consumption of corn as food, 2/3 of which goes to distillery and corn syrup processing here in the US.
Now, we do eat the livestock that is fed corn. We also ingest the processed foods, whether they be domestic or imported. But actual corn that is turned into meal or eaten raw as sweet corn? Less than 5% of what is grown is feeding you directly. And I would guess that, like wheat and rye and other grains, the majority of corn flour that you eat is processed locally and with minimal economic input. Because, once again, food goes bad… even grains. Milled grain does not last that long; many flours are hardly safe to eat for longer than a few months in a humid climate.
But then, let’s add one more substantial “use” of corn that is hidden in the data quoted above. Much corn may not feed any body, but much corn trade, the economics of corn, does not even involve actual corn. To start, there are the thousands of acres that are never harvested due to various subsidy programs that are designed to pay farmers to continue to feed into the market even though the market has no need of the grain. In Indiana, it is not uncommon to drive for miles in October and see nothing but harvestable corn left standing in the fields. I don’t honestly know what percentage this is of the corn market, of the money that changing hands because of corn. But in my experience, it is a very large portion of the fields in production and therefore of the production market (seed, fertilizer, machinery, etc). Though, it is possible that I’ve just experienced an unrepresentative number of heavily subsidized farmers…
But a more unbiased observation of the market is that a very large portion of unconsumed corn is harvested, transported and then, for various reasons, left to rot. Some of this ends up as animal feed. Some probably is turned into meal for impoverished markets. But most of it is literally just waste, left in silos and warehouses, awaiting a more favorable market that never comes.
We don’t even need corn to sell corn. It is traded as futures, projected harvest at projected sale prices. Some of these trades may eventually turn into sale of corn, but most don’t. And of those that actually include real corn, many end in those warehouses, waiting for the going rate to be at least as high as the price paid back when it was a future. This is the actual majority of monetary exchange related to corn, and it is the same for all grains, for all agriculture.
Agriculture is not growing food, it is growing the market.
Agriculture is not feeding you. Your bodily needs are not met by this market exchange. And in fact, if you are to be a healthy body, you do best to avoid the market exchange altogether. Processing with its high concentrations of sugar and salt, the lag time between harvest and consumption in which the nutritional quality is constantly degrading, the heavy concentration of carbohydrates and empty calories over other food groups — this is what the market provides. It is no coincidence that the medical industry grows in parallel with market-based food. Seems to me that’s by design. The marketeers double their profits by making us sick on their not-food and then selling us a “cure”. When the actual cure is just to eat local…
Which… is actually what most of us do. Because consider your shopping basket. Yes, I know this is heavily dependent on your age and your home-place. But even if you are a young urbanite with no kitchen, you are probably spending most of your food budget on locally produced and low cost real food. Because Pop-Tarts are expensive! And they do not fill you up. Much of what you eat may even be fast food, though that too is prohibitively expensive. But filling your belly with that crap is still not a major driver of the economy, because the economy makes its money almost independently of your belly. Regardless of who is profiting off your belly, I would bet that most of what you eat is minimally packaged, low cost, real food, mostly cooked locally, mostly sourced regionally. Because that is probably what you can afford. But more importantly because that is what real food is. It is place based and time dependent… just like your belly.
Of course, if you eat with any conscious intent to maintain health, which is the point of food, the actual bodily need met by food, then you are not part of the global market at all. You can’t be. Because healthy food is not global. Healthy food is located near you, where you live. It is mostly direct from primary producers, with very little processing. It is fresh and raw and therefore unmitigated by the market. Real food feeds you, bu it does not feed the economy.
Okay… so I think I’ve made the point that the market is not meeting bodily needs. However, while this shows that we are not the drivers of the economic machine, that doesn’t necessarily mean that homo economicus is not us by nature. Perhaps we are all unrequited marketeers just waiting for our chance to exploit the world… and waiting… and waiting… and waiting… much like corn futures…
So, are we? (Unrequited marketeers, not corn…) Are we, by nature, myopically and psychopathically selfish, as must be the case if the market, based on our behaviors, is to thrive?
Well, to answer that, first we need to define “we”…
Obviously, those who feed into and benefit from the market are largely assholes. The market works best with such personalities and rewards those behaviors the most. The greatest wealth and highest status in this culture accrue to those who are constitutionally willing and able to spread harm throughout the world in service to their own private gain. They have no guilt. They have no conscience. They do not even believe in benefits outside of monetary gain. Love? Friendship? Well-being? Happiness? Even sleep and eating real food? These are all weaknesses of lesser beings. (It must be so very boring being them…)
Those lesser beings, by the way? That’s most of the world…
Yes, the top tier of privilege is mostly the asshole set… Mostly but, significantly, not exclusively so. In fact, one of the prime reasons that wealth rarely builds in successive generations is that even among the privileged, these psychopathic traits are not normal. It is typically the case that some paterfamilias will build up an empire, and his children will fritter it away quite rapidly. Why? Because it sucks to be an asshole. All the privilege and zeroes in the bank balance do not come close to equating a life spent living. Which, in the world of privilege, means spending… But it also means engaging with other beings, forming relationships, doing things, enjoying things. It’s hard to be a real person, doing all these things, and willfully spread harm. You get quite lonely. You also quickly learn that harm from you usually comes back to harm you. Now, this is not quite the same as altruism, though that too is not unheard of in the privileged set, but it definitely is not the sort of single-minded psychopathy necessary to building wealth in this culture.
(It should also be noted that assholes find it rather hard to procreate. Most women have too much invested in pregnancy and child-rearing to treat love as a purely transactional relationship. Also, most women are looking specifically for the connection that assholes are incapable of providing.)
So… the fact that even privilege can not turn you into homo economicus might indicate that homo economicus is not default human nature. That bloggers will continue to assert that we are navel-gazing hyper-consumers, bent upon status acquisition and other short-term gains, says more about bloggers than it does about humans… (It must be so very boring…) And even they seem to be realizing that… well… they don’t know anyone like that… (Boring… and perplexing…)
That guy has to be out there, they argue, because this market is pumping out the dollars, right? No. We just talked about that. At length. It doesn’t take more than a handful of assholes to keep this economy going. In fact, to increase profits in a finite world, there can’t be more than a handful of assholes. More hands in the pot just diminishes the return… Which is exactly what we see in late-stage wealth concentration.
But still, maybe the unrequited thing is true? Maybe we all secretly wish to be assholes?
I would argue that, by and large, that is also not true. Because even within this world culture that only rewards assholes and actively harms most of us, we are, most of us, not that guy.
Going back to Sunday… What is written about human nature is not writing about humans. It’s writing about the ideas a small group of humans has about other humans that that group has never met. Studies on human nature are, similarly, testing theories of that small group and largely looking at data generated within the group. A sociological survey is not reaching farmers in Uganda, yak herders in Nepal, butchers in São Paulo. It is not even reaching shop girls in London or burger flippers in Watts. It certainly is not getting much data out of the homeless and the indigent. Study populations are largely drawn from — you guessed it — the same group of privileged people who are doing the study. Phone data lists tend to be skewed toward that group. Lab volunteer subjects are almost exclusively college kids, historically mostly white and mostly male. Only recently has any effort been expended to find a more representative body to study — because only recently has it been noticed that the white male is not a representative body.
Even field anthropology, where there is, at least theoretically, intimate contact with a study group, is quite often wrong… There are far too many stories in New Mexico that are variants on “how we lied to the guy with the tape recorder” for much that is written about New Mexicans by non-New Mexicans to be true. That the focus group will alter what they say and do in the presence of anthropologists is classic folklore in its own right now. Some of the families of my friends in Albuquerque have stories that they treasure of feeding misinformation to anthropology. Auntie Consuela actually had that guy believing that we cook tamales in a buried pig’s skull. And truly, if there is a human nature, there are few traits more constant that a desire to not be objectified. Especially by an outsider. Especially by an outsider who is apparently unable to see you sufficiently to comprehend your mounting desire to punch him in the face and send him and his notebook packing.
I mean, who wants to be a body that is studied! Who wants to be so depersonalized! To have everyone you know similarly stripped of individuality, so that you are all interchangeable study subjects and your being means nothing… So, yes, there is misinformation spread with intention… some gleefully malicious lies are told to pull a fast one on a guy who clearly thinks he’s pretty smart… even more untruths are uttered because that’s what we think the guy wants to hear, the answers that will satisfy him and make him go away… And all these fabrications are faithfully recorded by the earnest, if oblivious, academics.
What does this have to do with human nature? Well, much of what those who write about human nature comes from the skewed sample sets of sociologists and the lies that are told to anthropologists. In other words, they are writing about the ideas that their group has about humans, not about actual humans.
And then they wonder why no actual human in their lived experience actually matches those images in their writing.
I say, if you want to know human nature, put down the pen and look to your actual experience of humanity. What are you like? Chances are you are probably a human. And if you are a human, you have a human nature. The people around you have a human nature. The people you know have a human nature. Though we are all individuals with our own set of genetic predispositions and cultural conditions, probably no one Human Nature exists, there are some constants.
We all have some basic needs: love, connection, meaning, food, air, water, safety, shelter, comfort and pain avoidance. We all need to be alive and healthy, and there are only so many pathways to those goals. So logically, there are a few things that go into the make-up of all humans, and those might be the core of human semblance, could be what it means to be a human being. So, I think that how we meet those basic needs, how we do life, is actually a fairly good measure of humanity, both individually and as a collective at most scales. (I honestly don’t think there is a universal because ecology does curtail that sort of thing. Nature selects for place-based diversity, you know…)
To know what it is to be a human, look at how humans live. Look at how you live. What do you do? What do you believe? Are those things, your beliefs and your actions, in accordance within your life? Maybe not always. But most of the time? Probably so. We fretful beasts are simply happier when we act according to what we believe is good and proper. The good that we do is generally motivated by good that we want to do. Similarly, the harm that we do is often unintentional. So that unrequited marketeer? Probably not a thing. Also, because we are not normally happy when we cause harm, it is rather easy to get us to stop. Just show someone the harm they are causing. Only the psychopaths will keep on harming…
How do I know this? Because I know myself. I am a human. Because I know my family, my friends, my co-workers, my neighbors, my town. I know people in many different places and cultures. I know people of different classes, different values, vastly different belief sets. Yet, I have not ever met an actual psychopath. Now… there have been a few that came close… but they were decidedly outcasts in all of the groups of humans I’ve ever lived within.
And that is another indication that the dark view of humanity is probably wrong for most humans. Because within most human groups, there is no benefit to being an asshole. Indeed, you will be cast out. You will be ostracized. You will not be part of the group. You will not be party to decisions or allowed to join conversations. You will not be fed or clothed or sheltered. You will definitely not be loved (though you probably wouldn’t notice that). You will be meaningless and unnecessary, unwanted and unseen (and you will notice that!). All you will have in life is money… and nothing to ever spend it on… Assholes are toxic; they are avoided more so than any other nasty plague. We ring them about with strict quarantine, keeping them out of our groupings — though I would say the chances of contagion are really not that great. Because we don’t want to be treated like that by the people in our lives. We don’t want to be assholes. We want to be loved and respected and cared for. We don’t want to be turned away.
How do I know that? Because those who are turned away are not having their bodily needs met. Simple as that…
Being a psychopath might bring rewards within this economic system created by and for psychopaths, but it does not come with even basic human bodily comfort. Certainly, there is no happiness. There is no security. There is no hope in tomorrow or faith in today. You may have rich food on your plate and a choice of beds to sleep in, but you do not find pleasure in those things, only in your ownership of those things. You probably don’t even know what true pleasure feels like. It must be a living hell.
So are we all like that? Hell, no!
Again, I don’t know any actual psychopaths… Do you?
So, what is more average? The people you know? Or the ideas of a very small group of people who have an outsized capacity to scribble away about human nature…
I think you know the answer.
This is not merely a question of philosophy. The reason these bloviators are going on about human nature right now is because they are concerned about how we will be able to rise to meet the challenges created by homo economicus. Well, you know what? We already are rising admirably. We already do live mostly local and cause relatively little harm. We already do help our neighbors, indeed, wouldn’t, couldn’t think of doing otherwise. We already love our families and work hard to create a healthy world for them. We already love our places, our friends, our communities. We are kind to strangers. We are warm and gregarious. We smile. We care. We are creative and clever. We make beautiful lives in these interstitial spaces. We are good people.
Rest assured, bloviators, we don’t need the economy. We’re doing quite alright. And we always have been… You see, that is the essential thing. Most of the world has never been part of the asshole economy. Most of the world has only thrived when outside that economy. And most of those trapped within it by geography and politics have always built their real, tangible lives in the margins of that economy. It does not meet our needs. It never has. It is not capable of doing so. And that we are alive and well today means that we already know how to take care of ourselves and our world.
Yes, we’ll do just fine when the homo economicus system fails. Because we’re good people… we’re human…
Teaser image credit: Grand Prairie Farmers Market in Grand Prairie, Texas. By Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79215467