commodified thinking

So many people seem to look at things almost exclusively in the context of their perceived value as commodity or resource.

For example, they’ll say things like “Siesta Key is considered one of the 5 most beautiful beaches in the US.”

This is something my mom has said often.

She doesn’t say “I love Siesta Key,” or anything else that reveals her emotions about the place, but just repeats “Siesta Key is considered one of the 5 most beautiful beaches in the world,” like an advertisement.

[I almost wrote, "She doesn't say 'I love Siesta Key,' or anything else that reveals her relationship with the place," but I feel like the way she says that actually does reveal her "relationship." As opposed to demonstrating an emotional dependence developed over time (my own simplified definition of a relationship) it shows that "how she feels" about the place is more a mental construct "frozen in time," created out of her motivation for moving there and her need for social reinforcement that moving there was a good choice.]

I often do the same thing.

When I lived in Seattle, oftentimes I told people more or less “Seattle is good because you have easy access to the mountains.”

Like the way my mom talks about Siesta Key, by focusing on “access to the mountains,” I was effectively obscuring my actual relationship to the place, reducing it to a single abstraction.

Here’s another example:

In one of Lola Akinmade’s recent posts, a woman said: “I’ve just been back from The Gambia. . .Desperately poor country. Desperate. . .But they’ve got 500 species of birds!”

All three of these cases show how people tend to think about things in the context of their value, or their perceived value, even if they are abstractions, such as the “beauty” of a beach or the “proximity” of a wilderness area, or in terms of their “resources” such “500 species of birds.”

I feel like all of this represents a kind of “commodified” thinking similar to the commodification described in Marxist economic theory: “economic value is assigned to something not previously considered in economic terms; for example, an idea, identity or gender. . . ”

I feel like commodified thinking leads to negative situations.

These negative situations are created out of the following cause / effect pattern:

1. Commodified thinker isolates whatever is being “valued” from its temporal, historical, and cultural, and environmental context.

2. The thinker then knowing or unknowingly overlooks or ignores potentially fundamental relationships between what is being “valued” or looked at as a resource and those things’ (a) existence vis-à-vis their “place” or “role” in the environment, (b) their evolution over time, and (c) their potential development / destruction in the future.

I feel like commodified thinking is a way of insulating yourself from certain realities.

It is also seems like a way of “framing” reality or shaping it for your own purpose / advantage.

Commodified thinking is a byproduct of (a) growing up in a society that has traditionally viewed the natural world in terms of resources or something to be “managed,” combined with (b) attempting to do what is in one’s self-interest as it applies to that society.

Commodified thinking has origins in Western thought, leading back to Reductionism, beginning in Ancient Greece.

The opposite of commodified thinking is thinking about something in terms of its relationships to everything else.

This is also known as Holism.

An example of holism: Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” [this example is from Wikipedia].

Usually I feel alienated however, by writing or journals associated with the word “holistic.”

I feel like there is a paradox in that only through describing what happens in one place to one person can you effectively “show” the relationships / truths that can be interpreted or “seen” everywhere.

This is how I define whether or not something has literary value, and it tends to be a “guiding principle” when deciding what to read, what to write, what to publish.

Which all takes me back to the beginning, and makes me wonder if that isn’t just another form of commodified thinking.