Epictetus said, "it is you who know yourself, how much you are worth to yourself, and at what price you sell yourself; for men sell themselves at various prices" (Discourses, 1.2).
...there are economies everywhere. Every moment, the Stoics say, is a decision within one's economy, where one type of life is exchanged for another. For the Stoic, that was why you disciplined your body- by doing so, you learned which economies would sustain you best. You learned the role of hunger and want for lowering the price of satisfaction; the role of attentiveness to death in order to lower the price of actual death; the role of pain in order to lower the price of pleasure. The Stoic economy was a minimalist economy, an economy at a lower frequency...
...there are other economies. There is the Epicurean economy, where one takes pleasure in everything, because one recognizes the role of fate, and thus one is amor fati. One also learns the role of distance, and thus serenity, that allows even the most banal thing to be enjoyable...
...there is the capitalist economy, where one learns the negative role of freedom. Freedom in this economy means the restriction that comes with "unlimited" growth; the disruption of "upward mobility"; the heavy weight of the impersonal "market"; the paralysis of "infinite possibility"; Hume's fork, that-all-too important separation of what something "is" from what it "ought" to be (the "is" is merely what we make of something in it's exchange); the restriction (on some) of the unequal exchange (for which a "profit" is only possible)...
...is there a democratic economy? This is the economy I'm interested in. A democratic economy would be an exchange of equality, perhaps a radical equality, were the reasons one gives are acceptalbe in themselves; where the entry fee is merely being a person; where my exchange is the same as yours...but of course that's a utopia. Everyone sells themselves, and everyone has different prices.
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yes.
and what is the economy of your writing of the economy? the price, the payoff?
-one might ask what the use of such reflexive questions could possibly be if continually asked, if continually imposed upon our human interactions. such a person would say, 'isn't this metaphor of economy spent (at some point)?' perhaps at the point where we use another metaphor to revise--to redescribe our vision, which perhaps is merely a jocular twist, a loosening.
the metaphor of economy as itself subject to an economy, namely the economy of the exchange of ideas.
-well, unless you don't want to say that everything is an economy, but instead just that "there are economies everywhere" like "there are pigeons everywhere", i.e. you wouldn't be meant to be taken to 'seriously.'
but if not, if you are serious:
could we lose the metaphor in an exchange? if we deemed it 'lost in the exchange' wouldn't it just thereby reinstate or reaffirm it? you seem to want to hold onto this notion that we all have prices. well, in one sense, of course we do and this is useful to point out, say, when one has glimmers of a utopia. but to say this and to apply to it all possible instances of exchange between persons, to which you may or may not be committed--that is, sold on--just seems to buy into the metaphor too much. shouldn't we take our time, not stop too long at any one booth, but browse the bazaar?
to be fair, it seems your conclusion is not so much to PROVE that we are always in an economy, but to say that it is naive to think that a democratic economy--an economy that escapes the economy through an 'exchange' of equality?--is possible.
with all of this perhaps i have tried to sell you goods you didn't ask for, like a street merchant who only has one brand of item to sell and will sell it to anyone. the other day i saw a man in london with a small briefcase full of the cheapest england world cup light-up hats...he's a bit early, ha ha. Unzeitgemäße economy!
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