Gift Economy my left butt-cheek
Comments(10) Is anyone familiar with the concept of a gift economy? Well I am. At least, I am now. I went to a talk on various aspects of Burning Man (read: hippie) culture. The worst one by far was the “gift economy” talk which may have been the biggest load of crap I have ever heard in my life. Unfortunately, the speaker was useless. Had she been any less than terrible I would have felt entirely fine about arguing with her, but as things stood any debate between us would have resembled a rabbit being run over by an articulated lorry.
I’ll cover the concepts that were expressed very briefly, and then rant about them at length. First off they claimed that capitalism “believed in scarcity”, the logic of this being that this is why they save, or “hoard” posessions. Gift economists, or worthless hippies as I generally prefer to call them, “believe in plenty”, and therefore share everything.
What the fuck?
Believing in plenty kinda sounds like the act of believing there is more than enough for everyone actually makes some sort of difference to reality. Like somehow, giving away whats yours will magically create more to go around. Except of course for the essential flaw here, because nothing is yours. You have no right to anything, the only things you will have are gifted to you by someone else, someone who has no reason to give you anything except your need of it.
The more capable you are of surviving, the less you will be given, the more you contribute, the less you will receive and the more you must give away, all the time, to those who do less, but need more. Nothing can be earned, everyone is a beggar. The act of giving becomes meaningless, nothing is given but for the sake of need. Nothing is posessed, because that would be hoarding.
Capitalism is based on getting what you earn, on trading value for value. No, its not perfect as a system. But its by far the best concept anyone has come up with. but it means if you want something, and you work hard enough, have enough skills or talents, you can get it. In a gift economy, the only things you can possess are what no-one else needs or wants. What a disgusting waste of human ability and achievement.
Not that such an impractical and ridiculous idea could ever be put into practise anyway. Humans are fools, not suicidal imbeciles. I will never believe humanity is crap enough to really attempt that. I just wish they would stop calling it a utopian fucking ideal. Because if thats an ideal evolved society, then I’ll take back my banana, crawl into a tree, and scratch myself for the rest of my life. It will be more worthwhile.
Hippies, hippies… they want to save the world but all they do is smoke pot and play frisbee!
Actually, I wish I was smoking pot and playing frisbee right now…
Anyhoo, free market capitalism is a flawed and in many ways disgraceful and disgusting system, but you’re not going to improve things by spouting meaningless clap-trap like this gift economy shite. While the idea of making sure everyone has what they need is admirable (and lacking from free market capitalism) this gift economy mumbo-jumbo seems to ignore the idea that as well as needing things, people will also want things, and won’t be willing to settle for whatever gifts other people think they need.
I’m sure gift economics may work incredibly well for these beat-nik hippies at their smelly hippy festival that lasts for one week out of the entire year. This nonsense would never work in real life.
my biggest fear in the capitalist economy is that those that do not possess the talents, skills, mental or even physical capacity to go out and chase after the rewards have no hope of attaining them. what ebout the mentally handicapped? abandoned children? in a capitalist society, those left to the mercy of the greedy and grasping overachievers are usually underserved….the point being that people born and bred in a society where the motto is ‘to each his own’ will not be overly sympathetic to the plight of those who can’t get their own.
For example, the welfare system in america only works for undeserving people who exploit it, while children are yanked around from foster home to foster home and mentally impaired and ill adults are booted out of government care facilities and group homes to live on the streets. All the while, politicians whittle away at their programs to fund tax cuts for big spenders, a war which no one really wants to fight, and thousands of other useless initiatives which serve basically only the people who make them.
yay capitalism.
I hate hippies! I like capitalism.
Why shouldn’t the talented, able and intuitive people be rewarded? Why not? Who says one has a right to possessions just because they need them? Why are we housing the undeserving, who just sit around drinking tea and smoking fags all day? The untalented, undriven and undermotivated people of our society should not be allowed survive.
Amanda: many abandoned children have gone on to do great things and as for the mentally handicapped; look at Christy Browne (who had Cerebral Palsey, but you get the point)….
Lets put all the hippies into a pot, boil them and feed them to the homeless…
Capitalism is not perfect, and I have not claimed it as such. The things I leave aside when I talk about ability are those born firmly without it, with mental or physical handicaps. On the other hand, I know there are many people of both categories who can work, who can earn and achieve, and there are many structures in place which allow this. I have an aunt and two uncles who are mentally handicapped, two of them have had jobs for years, and are good at them.
The problem with welfare states is how you draw the line between deserving and not. Most problems in life are with where you draw the line. And in a huge society that line is blurred at best. I don’t claim to know where it goes either, and would hate the job of drawing it. But if people can choose to stay home in their government flats and pump out children in order to claim a bigger free house, then its in the wrong place.
Capitalism doesn’t work. I freely acknowledge this. But no other system works either, and of all of them, the ideals of capitalism are by far the least offensive to my value system, and it fails in the least harmful way.
EARHART… christy brown was physically and not mentally handicapped… hence the whole wheelchair… his mind was fairly much perfect…
Capitalism undiluted is as hopeless as any hippy “ideal society”, it is through social reform that the society progresses.
When deciding on a system to affiliate themselves with, people look to much toward principals and so much less towards practicle change and application of ideal.
If you were a greedy business man its still within your interest to make your employees feel happy so you can make more money from them.
What I believe we need to do is address problems and not principals, forget about Marx’s predictions and dreams, focus on minimum wage and social welfare, forget about 1 man one house and sign up for some of your free time at the simon community.
And furthermore by simply rewarding the talented and screwing over everyone else you create more problems than you solve, especially in the next generation.
point taken, and rightly so. i know a girl who squeezed out 5 kids for the welfare money, and even though she is perfectly capable of work, lives off the dole. my sister was her social worker…and she was also the social worker for a girl that was severely emotionally disturbed and booted out of her group home to go live with her alcoholic mother, and she ran away 3 months later. she surfaced about a year after that, having been arrested for drug possession and soliciting.
as a side note: isn’t cerebral palsy more of a physical handicap than a mental handicap? dude, the man could write and paint with his toes. you’ve got to be pretty sharp upstairs to navigate that.
You cannot look too much toward principles. The reason people say things like that is because so often their principles are the wrong ones. To discount principles in favour of practical application implies that the wrong principles could have the right results, which really doesn’t compute.
And who said anything about rewarding the talented and screwing over everyone else? I said value for value, and thats as it should be. I never said I don’t value people who aren’t clever, or aren’t strong, or aren’t skilled. The world needs dustmen, and roadsweepers, and people to drive trucks. And thats not a derrogatory comment, its true, and it makes sense.
The point is not that some jobs are better than others. They are, and we all know it. Neither is the point that some people are more gifted than others, though that too is true. And I use the word gifted in a very real sense, because every ability we are born with is a gift we did not earn, the only way to earn it is to do with it as much as you can do. The point is that you are defined by what you do, and how well you do it. And if you choose to do nothing, you are usually worth nothing.
I KNOW Cerebral Palsey is a physical illness. Hence I wrote (He had Cerebral Palsey but you get the point) on my frist post. I just couldn’t think of anyone with a mental illness who achieved great things. Stephen Hawkins was my next guess – but again, nothing wrong upstairs there. There’s always Corky from that TV show – what was that called?
oh dude. life goes on. that was a dumb show,but he was a good actor.
um, schizophrenia is a mental illness, and lots of people with that particular illness are massively creative. but then again, he that picks from the tree of creativity with one hand often plucks from the tree of madness with the other…hence my life.
Nice Post.
That was well said. Always appreciate your indepth views. Keep up the great work!
John