Exchange

When we kiss, we exchange not just body fluids, but our love and affection for each other. An exchange is a transaction founded upon a contract of trust. When I hand over something in exchange, I trust that what I receive will be a good. We do not expect in its simple form a bad. Good meets good. That is an exchange. Yet economics founded upon scarcity of resources does not recognise this simple element of trusting and good exchange. I can shake hands and contract myself to an exchange where the value might meet the market price, but the tenor of the exchange is bad. If we were to compose an orchestral piece made of all the exchanges irrespective of kind, there would be melody and sweetness in the old sense, but very often it would jar with bad exchanges. Indeed, it may well be that although intentions at the scale of the individual exchange, like all codes of honour and trust, are good; the mechanisms of the market driven by monetary interests distort and destroy that good. Suppose, we imagine that some poor person living in project housing or a mobile home, aspired to change their lives by moving to a better neighbourhood or bigger house. This person would be vulnerable to an exchange which allowed for this to happen for little in return. They might think that the interest repayments in the future were not really part of the exchange. Because they saw the contract as an exchange of trust at the very point of transaction in that realtor's office in a small town in Alabama. They could not envisage that there would have to be trust that was additional - and that while the realtor beamed like sunrise itself, the conditions and terms of the loan were not made obvious, nor that this was indeed a bad, because it was in the future. Instead one had the feeling that the keys of the house were handed over as if they were a gift. "Here you are, for a petty sum I here donate to you long-suffering citizen, a house. "According to the practice of the time, this exchange was all kosher, but its consequences were a bad. By a bad one does not need to import JudeoChristian connotations, simply the break of trust between two individuals as enshrined in the fiduciary relationship. Now, as we know this kind of dishonesty, and let us not mince words, was built into the financial system, since it was predicated upon value rather than good. Many were party to exchanges that involved a bad. This multiplied and became a pandemic of lack of trustworthiness. Much of this has to do with what Erwin Goffman calls face. The social psychology of interpersonal space, and its behaviours, fails to describe the interactions that occur within a system rather than between two individuals. As the millions if not billions of exchanges took place, many took place in the emptiness of computation inside machines, as flashes of information. Lost was the kiss of affection, the shake of a hand....