That which follows is to serve as an intuition pump, just to help figure with the help of a few concrete verbal constructions those links that would otherwise remain fuzzy.
I propose that fear is the beating heart of our society and that society remains viable to the extent that it can deal with the fear it faces. Fear should not be viewed one-sidedly and negatively. It is a two-dimensional condition combining aversion and desire. It entails avoidance of things considered injurious and dangerous and pursuit of things seen as good and advantageous. I further propose that modern society has created, not consciously but spontaneously and evolutionarily, the social institution of market as a tentative, and not necessarily the ideal but useful, solution to deal with its problem of fear.
The first incarnation of this fear is the fear of loss and, hence, of extinction. The fundamental basis of any market, that is, the transaction between buyers and sellers having incomplete and imperfect information about each other’s intentions, is governed by the desire to sell our wares, whatever their nature, at a profit. This love of profit is the stage appearance of the fear of loss. This fear is so deeply ingrained in human nature that notions of success and failure, dignity and self-esteem, and fullness and void seem to be bottomed upon the themes of profit and loss.
It has been the fear of forcible dispossession mixed with a fear of violence against oneself that laid the basis for the juridical sanctity of property indispensable for the functioning of markets. Buyers and sellers need to have identifiable and distinct rights and obligations with respect to their ownership of goods without which markets shall cease to function. It seems that the juridical concept of the individual as the subject of law and a philosophical category is closely allied to the concept of property and a demand resulting from the need to make exchange possible and punish transgressors trammelling it.
Market is motivated by the fear of ignorance as a limiting factor which serves as a fillip for progressive advancement of human knowledge. Incomplete and partial information is a perpetual feature of all market transactions. The attempts to reduce these informational blinkers lead to the development of new ways of doing and making things. Successive and continual technological advances in society can be viewed as a mechanism to cope with the problem of imperfect information and increase profitability.
Market may have played a decisive role in the evolution of morals. Market transactions originally implied predominantly one-on-one encounter for exchange of goods and services between people many of whom did not know each other well. Rules of business needed to be drawn. The fear of strangers and the necessity of meeting strangers one could not and did not readily trust to do business contributed to the development of moral principles governing public and private conduct of individuals. Myriad such encounters deepened the conceptions of trust, fair play and reliability.
This encounter also mitigated the fear of anonymity and lack of personhood. We become aware of ourselves as distinct beings as a result of our extended observation of others. Our notion of our own difference is based on our realisation of our similarity with others. The basis of our self-knowledge as unique is therefore mimetic. This mimetic reflection of our selves develops a sense of identity and helps us become functional members of human society. Exchange encounter in the market tended to serve as an important and frequent site for this constitutive process of mutual reinforcement of identity.
Although state as a political institution predates market, yet its modern historical development has been subordinated to the forces arising out of market. The fear of social disorder resulting from the increasing complexity of organisation of social life unleashed by the forces of social mobility in post-medieval Europe created the need for disciplinary techniques of social control to ensure the continued operation of free individuals freely conducting exchange of goods and services in the market. This necessitated the transformation of the medieval lazy state into an active modern alert structure of government for regulating demographic distribution through controlling movement of people, population control primarily through institutionalisation of family, and flow of goods in and out of the national territory.
In sum, market allays our fear of the totalitarian assaults of authoritarianism. When referred to as free, regardless of the real conditions prevailing in its real-life referent, it encapsulates the struggle of humanity since 1789 for freedom from want and oppression like no other mental construct does. This is so because market reinforces the doctrine of free will as no transaction in the market would succeed unless people first perceived themselves as free agents endowed with free will entering into an obligation without any external pressure or duress of any kind.
The writer is a senior policy analyst working for OIC’s Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation
