by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015
Prostitution may be mankind's oldest profession, but commerce surely started only days later, and has had just as conflicted a relation in human communities. On the one hand people love the benefits of trading, on the other they envy the wealth acquisition of successful traders, and they deeply fear personally becoming the butt of sharp trading practices and fraud. The story of Jesus casting out the money lenders is an example of a community's populist response when it perceives that a small group of the community is profiting too much from commerce.
Fast forward to the 21st century and this issue of how much a person should make, how they should make their money, how they should spend it, and how much the community should share in this spending decision (taxes, infrastructure and entitlements), is still a white-hot one within every community on earth. And it affects both how history unfolds, and how the history story gets written up.
When an issue has been on everyone's mind for thousands of generations, the brain will develop instinctive thinking about it. But commerce is not easy for instinctive thinking to get a handle on because there are so many ways it can work well. Instinctive thinking likes to support a small handful of right answers, but commerce has always succeeded in many ways. Commerce remains mostly an analytic thinking process.
But instincts have developed, and what follows is an observation of some of the instincts that affect how commerce is conducted in a community.
Commerce started as barter with strangers. In the Neolithic Village lifestyle contact with strangers was rare so the Us versus Them thinking was strong -- it is more OK to "cheap-shot" (my term) strangers than family and close neighbors. As a result Stone Age and Agricultural Age commerce was a risky undertaking and it usually had a lot of well-armed security mixed in -- caravans had guards, trading ships had marines, trading places were fortified. And the bartering process itself was caveat emptor -- let the buyer beware -- both the merchant and whomever he was trading with had to be on their toes.
As a result those who indulged in a lot of inter-village trading were exceptional in their thinking. They had to navigate this "alien environment" often and well, and few in the community did this often.
The result is that for much of commerce's history merchants have been considered a little-to-a-lot outside of the mainstream community. When times were good this difference was tolerated, when times got scary merchants could become witch-hunt targets along with other village "outsiders"... but with a difference. Because they used it in day-to-day operations, merchants were surrounded by a lot of "muscle" while the average "witch" was not -- no question who got sacrificed for angry god appeasing first!
But if times got bad enough, the merchants did get on the appeasement list, and even in calmer times when community laws were passed they could be the butt of them.
Another merchant characteristic was that they tended to be free thinkers. They traveled more, they had to deal with alien situations more often, and they did not gain a lot from being conformists. Their world was gray from day one, and new ideas could bring new opportunities so they listened more openly.
And, they dealt a lot with money (as soon as that concept was invented) so it is not surprising that finance was spawned from commerce and the two have always stayed closely tied.
The question of "who should get what" has been with mankind since well before mankind was the homo sapiens species -- most kinds of animals have dominance disputes about who should get what, and even plants do so in subtle ways.
In Neolithic Village environments the total amount of "goodies" to have disputes over was small. Because Neolithic humans lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle the total goody count was pretty much only what could be eaten from day-to-day and carried from one village site to the next when the good times ran out at a particular location. As a result goodies were a small part of the lifestyle and communal sharing arrangements worked well with what was taken from place-to-place. This environment is what human instinctive thinking is well designed to work with.
But Agriculture Age lifestyle was a huge game changer in this area -- if people are living their whole lives in one or just a handful of places, the goody count can rise astronomically, and who gets what becomes a much bigger issue. We are talking permanent farms and cities now, something quite different from semi-nomadic villages. Mankind's instinctive thinking is beginning to adapt to this, but the adaptation is far from complete.
The strong instinct that Neolithic Village thinking supports is "fairness". When people make their choices based on "what is fair" and "helping the poor" they are using their thinking that is well-adapted to the Neolithic Village environment. In that environment this concept of communal sharing helped the village survive better. And sometimes this thinking works well in the Industrial/Information Age environment, but not always.
But work well or not, it is a powerful concept. And if people have many choices available to them because they are prosperous, and they "let their heart be their guide" when they are choosing, fairness will be a big factor.
Fairness and commerce often butt heads. Commerce is not about being fair, it is about winning in an exchange. The other guy can win, too, and should if you are going to go more trading rounds in the future, but fairness is not a big part of the thinking mix.
Fairness thinking also includes a lot of prescriptive, conformity thinking, as in, "There is one right way to handle this situation and we all should handle it the same way. That is fair." This too grates against commercial thinking because a merchant gets used to dealing with many situations and handling each in a different way. Once again, a shades-of-gray environment compared to the black-and-white of the fairness environment.
All of the above have been constants for hundreds of generations. These have been givens of the commercial environment since the dawn of history. But living on earth is full of surprises, and the Industrial/Information Age pulled a brand new rabbit out of the living-on-earth hat. And this difference between being fair thinking and growing the resource pie thinking is at the root of a lot of Industrial Age social history.
Commerce, finance and entrepreneurship have been going head-to-head with instinctive fairness thinking ever since long-range commerce was invented. These are two different mind sets, and there is a lot of history made in expressing these two mind sets and then in deciding how communities should take actions which mesh them together.
--The End--