The meaning of language, money and the market

People use language. 

And I found that they use it largely for taking what they want. 

What they want is connection. 

Connection with other people. 

No matter what types of words or sentences they say, the ultimate aim of language is connection, except for its basic utility for our survival. 

Connection, or relationship or intimacy or whatever... is what humans are always concerned with.

It is not only language that serves that purpose. 

Money is also, except for its utility in helping us survive, all about human connection.  

All money can do is virtually to make the connection we have with other humans better or nicer. 

What if you have millions of money and live in an island alone without any humans but a bunch of other animals, ... 

Likewise, if you live in a world and there is no one you can love or want to have any relationship with, then your money and your language have no meaning other than making you survive. 

The market, like money, is all about relationship. 

I may look like a pro-market rightist because I wrote lots of writing about (classical or Lockean, not social) liberalism and the importance of the market in human history. 

But to speak precisely, I am just skeptical of the current academic views that regard socialism as the alternative to the market economy or what they call capitalism. 

More precisely speaking, I just indicate the dangerous adverse effects of the ideology of state intervention under the propaganda of social redistribution of wealth, or elimination of inequality. 

Socialists just do not seem to know what kinds of cost is needed to realise what they promote.  

I do not particularly like the market. 

The market is just an interesting area for me in terms of human relationship or social interaction.  

On the contrary, I always try to find different elements in the market than competition or selfishness. 

Rather, I feel shocked whenever I find many people approach human relationship as a matter of competition. 

Some of them are even anti-market socialists. 

Other people who say that they are against the market principles are collectivists and they are usually hostile to individualism. 

One of the features of those collectivists is that they regard human relationship as nothing but a power game between the nice and poorer groups and the bad and richer groups. 

(It is no wonder in human history that in the absence of the market it was always politics that filled the empty space). 

But even when people are not overwhelmed by such a distorted and superficial relationship, they still act on the basis of exact calculations of their interests when they make certain decisions. 

It may be natural phenomena.

What I am concerned with in particular is values, which are the variants that are used in the mathematical function for the calculation. 

Values are actually the determinant factor of the interests, which people attempt to calculate for their own decision making. 

Although people consciously or unconsciously calculate their own interests all the time, they do not know what kinds of value system they live in. 

If the fundamental value changes, the interests which the value determines change. 

And if the interests change, people's choice also change. 

But the value is subjective. 

It depends on what kinds of, or how much, meaning you put to a certain object.

The object can be your time that you have during your life time or your life itself. 

What I always try to find in the market or human relationship is the value sets people have in their mind. 

The market may look like just nothing but a place where people compete and fight for their own benefits. 

But if we examine it more in detail, we can find that the mechanism of the market is entirely dependent on the value of people living in a certain society during a certain era. 

It means that if you are independently able to put your own meanings to the objects, not being bound by social constraints or social pressure, then you can live your own fulfilling life.

If you can have your own sets of value in life, then you can be free from the temptations for such hectic and meaningless endeavours to compete others or try to gain power to dominate others.  

The very reason most people say they hate the market or competition or whatever .. (though the reality is that they live throughout their life under the bitterness or anxiety caused by their struggle for power or their competition with others) ...  is actually because they do not realise the subjectivity of their own value sets. 

They consider the values endowed by society as objective or indefinite.  

They live in a kind of confinement of the framework set up by social values which are embedded in language, money and the market. 

Why do you envy wealthier or more capable people?

Why do you feel jealous of prettier or more handsome people?

It is useless thing to do. 

If you are very very beautiful, no matter how you define beauty is, but if you live in a world of the blind, then what is the point of your beauty?

If you are very very intelligent, but if you live in a world of the ignorant who cannot have any intellectual conversation with you, then what's the point of your intelligence?

If you have an enormously expensive car, private airplane or yacht or whatever, but if you do not have anyone to travel with, then what's the point of all those things? 

As always I have been until now, I would be more interested in the market phenomena than political gossips. 

And the market is the place where we evaluate each other's value in a sense. 

But it is up to you what kinds of value sets you would have, on which your choice in the market would completely rely.

As I always have said, the market is not a place for merely the exchange of money and goods. 

It is a place of choice and values.  

 

The thing that is needed for us is neither biased hostility towards, nor blind chasing after, competition for money or politics for power.

What is needed is the mind of gratitude. 

In the absence of grateful feelings, the vacancy is filled with all sorts of desires and jealousy. 

And the feeling of gratitude comes from the realisation of the value ... of true yourself. 

As one of my religious mentor said in the past, I always try to believe that God is within me, which I think might be the true value of myself. 

© 2017 Min Bae