I argued that commercial society—the mutual gift-giving society of exchange—is a main venue by which people experience this type of love. We encounter strangers in the marketplace and discover mutual interests. You know this from experience, whether at your workplace (as it once was) or where you meet friends for a meal and drink. Or it could be the server or salesperson you encounter one time or often.
Not only that, the marketplace enables us to become the benefactors of people we have never met. Hundreds of places and thousands or millions of people are involved in the production of nearly everything we consume.
A deeper form of love fostered by the marketplace involves falling in love with achievement through the pursuit and realization of an idea. We are encouraged to try new ways to bring better goods and services to others and do so with excellence in mind. The entrepreneur experiences a type of romance with an idea.
In elucidating this moral dimension of economics, I do think the book makes a unique contribution.
The book was born of a dream, or nightmare, more precisely, that I had some years earlier. I had been driving in a new town and I tried to reimagine that downtown space in the absence of life-giving commerce. I saw in my imagination a place devoid of energy, friendship, association, and ideas, a place barren of love. It was to forestall such a thing that I wrote this book. So far in my meager literary career, this book was my proudest achievement.
I had no idea what was coming just a few months after its release. The market was essentially abolished with the stroke of a pen. Downtowns everywhere turned into ghost towns. The churches were closed. Flea markets were out of the question. The farmers markets went away. The small businesses closed completely. The bars and restaurants closed. Supply chains, the result of years of cultivation, were wrecked.
That was three years ago, and I’ve yet to revisit my happiest book, probably because doing so I assumed would be too painful. The person who wrote that was singing hymns of praise to the system we had in place and I had completely failed to understand the fullness of the threats all around us, which came to fruition. My nightmare had come true. I fought it with all my might but without much effect.
It wasn’t until today that I realized that there still might be a purpose to this book: as a monument to what was and can be again. Think about the title: The Market Loves You. What happens, then, when you get rid of the market? What replaces love? Demoralization, sadness, loneliness, and even hate. The absence of love means a dreary and directionless life, an existence of routine compliance. That is precisely what we have found in the wake of lockdowns.
So perhaps my “greatest” book that was, in a way, completely wrong might in fact be saved from disrepute. If the market really is a form of love, we see now what comes when we lock it down and forcibly make it go away. Instead of a world teeming with relationships and exchange, we today inhabit a world that is struggling, scared, and untrusting.
Yes, markets are coming back together again, but they aren’t the same. They are dominated by the big players. In retail, we know who they are. In restaurants, we know the brands. In tech, they are all too familiar. Rare these days is the encounter of an organic market experience, institutions that came back after lockdowns that genuinely serve a community. What has replaced the free market, about which I sang praises, is an oligarchic corporatism.
There is the further problem of market distortions, especially inflation, that pits producers against consumers in a struggle for who will pay the rising costs of everything.
And we look around us and see such incredible sadness that I do not remember as a dominant cultural trait only a few years ago. It’s not until you spend time and talk with people that you see and feel it. Everyone these days has a story of tragedy. It could be the funeral you could not attend, the wedding you could not hold, the business that was cut off at the arch of achievement, or the family members estranged by an argument about the vaccine. There are so many stories of tragedy.
But the biggest loss of all is our communities that we had come to take for granted. It could be the friends we had at church who stopped attending, the shopkeeper we used to see fortnightly until the business shut down, the friend who unfriended us for political reasons, or the family reunions that met annually that somehow cannot form anymore. There are so many stories.
And the worst of it is the alienation so many people feel. You turn on the TV or radio and hear people talk nonsense that just does not connect with our pain at any level. They had cheered the lockdowns, then the masking, then the vaccines, and then quickly moved on to other things. No sooner had that ended than we were instructed that the most important things were Ukraine, trans rights, and global warming. Where is the empathy? Where is the connection to anything real?
Last night, I attended a comedy club featuring Jimmy Dore. We were all sitting so very close together, so there was no choice but to share stories, which we did for 30 minutes before the show began. It turns out that most people there had some experience to tell. You see, Dore is a rare example of a mainstream voice who took a different position on the vaccine. That works as a signal: This man is not like the others. Most everyone there was completely thrilled to be among others who share the hope that we are not all insane, contrary to what the mainstream media reports.
The room was electric for 90 minutes during his excellent performance. But it wasn’t the performance as such that did it. It was the sense of community and belongingness that brought us together. We realized that night that we are not alone. We realized that there were others in our tribe of truth-seekers. That’s why they paid the high-priced tickets, and that’s why the energy was so high in the room.
There is a massive amount of healing that needs to happen in our society today. It’s genuinely sad that we have to go to a comedy club to find it. But it makes sense. They took away our organic communities, our community associations, our businesses, our schools, and our markets. They took away the manner in which we had habitually come to love each other.
The cruelty was unspeakable. There is growing evidence that it was all deliberate. The point was to divide us, shatter our communities, isolate us, turn us against each other, demoralize us, take away the will to participate in real progress, deny the right of human volition, and drain us of love. It worked. We are easier to control under such circumstances.
So how do we fight back? We need only reverse the trajectory. Engagement, association, community, truth, and, above all else, love. This is the path to defeat power and the way to fight evil. We simply cannot allow the dream of freedom to die in this generation.
