Forget Your Heart

Eves dropping on a business meeting

Sitting beside me, a couple of people are talking about investments. One of them, I’m picking up, is trying to pitch a company to the other. They are talking about demographics, seed money, how to make the company look more valuable and interesting to potential clients. The two men that are talking are young, maybe four or five years older than me, and they are speaking business with ease and simplicity. It’s a form of speech that I understand inherently growing up here, but at the same time, listening to every single word these two share, I have no clue what the fuck they are talking about, even if the language of business is a simple one. 

One of them, possibly the founder, said, “We could find different characteristics of someone and find someone else who fits into that,” possibly inferring a perfect target demographic, investor, or employee.
This language of business sounds so simple and directs itself into how to manage humans into properly using them to gain more profits by stripping individuals into their useful parts. From there, all you have to do is fill the slots and solve the puzzle, then you’re done finding whoever or whatever it is you needed to exploit for your gain.

We think under this delusion, that people are best not as people, but as tools of our own acquiring of wealth. We believe, generally, that creating something new, like an app, some new crypto currency, or brand to stick on a hat is inherently good and necessary, both things millennia of human history, and just a days sitting and thinking about economics could prove you wrong. And due to this thinking, we believe that the need to monetize every object or idea is the inevitability of our society. We get this, I assume, that for many, this economic system makes us have to act outside of ourselves, perform some social movements far from who we are.

This performance also makes it so these two men, sitting there in this cafe, talking about their business plans, are taught to have no interest in each other as individuals. The man being pitched perhaps is neglectful of the vulnerability that this other individual is in by asking for his money. They can’t exchange things other than assets, potential interests in the future, and how to interest bigger investors in the future.

What saddens me about this economic system, beyond the known misgivings espoused by pretty much anyone who wants climate change to be curbed or equity to flourish in our resource rich societies, is that these two men have no interest in who the other is. As I’ve listened to the vagaries of this conversation, it seems, just from the reserved tone they share, that these two men possibly have no clue about the other’s heart. It’s a funny concern, but if the man invests in the other’s idea, shouldn’t he be concerned about the character of the other? Not at all. He only matters to the other in so far as how he can make money from him. It stops there.

In capitalism, love, an essential piece of the beauty of everyday life, is only tangential. It is essentially unnecessary to the functioning of our world. Because of this, all these men care about is only how they can benefit from the other. We all know this, explicitly or inherently,  because this is how our world works. We know how easily this world can put us into competition with each other—from there we so readily forget one another’s heart.