Relationships as Creative Currency
Kanye West is undoubtedly a wise man. The wisest words he’s ever spoken? “Relationships are a more important currency than money itself.”
Context: The Twilight Years of Sensate Liberty and the Sensate Era
In our present sensate age, we’ve come to center our conceptions of virtue and value alike around material acquisition, primarily in the form of currency. Money. We’ve come to place monetary capital above social capital, accumulating material excess for the individual instead of altruistic and cooperative excess for the whole.
I will leave it to a better man than myself — renowned scholar Pitirim Sorokin — to briefly explain the emergence of this phenomenon:
“With individualism, the period became the century of triumphant sensate liberty, in contradistinction to ideational liberty. If liberty means the possibility for one to do whatever he pleases, he is free when he can do what he wants. If his desires are satisfied, he is free; if not, he is unfree. If the sum total of his wishes exceeds his means of satisfying them, he is unfree; per contra, if the sum of his wishes does not exceed or is smaller than the total sum of his means of satisfying them he is free. Hence we derive the general formula of liberty as Sum of means / Sum of wishes. When the numerator exceeds or is equal to the denominator, one is free; otherwise he is not.
A person can therefore become free in two different ways: either by decreasing his wishes to make them equal to or smaller than the means of their satisfaction, or by expanding his wishes and increasing proportionally the means of their satisfaction. The first is the way of ideational liberty, consisting in a reduction of one’s wishes, especially sensory ones. The second is the way of sensate liberty, consisting in an ever-increasing expansion of one’s wishes for sensory values, accompanied by an equal or greater expansion of the means of satisfying them.”
This ever-increasing expansion of one’s wishes paired with the subsequent need for greater means to satisfy them aligns well with Eric Weinstein’s idea of the EGO, or Embedded Growth Obligation, that has become so pervasive in our present day and age.
The EGO describes those structures built into our modern institutions that assume a pattern of never-ending growth, a future trajectory of unceasing linear progress. Indeed, the emergence of the EGO as a fundamental part of our governmental, financial, and social systems is directly linked to the predominance of the sensate form of liberty.
The means of our governments’ powers must grow indefinitely as our demands from them increase by the day; the greatest authorities are given in states of crisis for understandable reasons. Our businesses — driven by our demands for more and more goods at lower and lower costs — must strive to make every last dollar they can, maximize productivity and efficiency as much as they can, and keep a positive trend on all the right line graphs on every corporate PowerPoint they make. Our friends lists on social media must be growing continually, and so too must our like and comment counts.
We want to be free by continually doing more, experiencing more, having more, instead of finding appreciation for that which is much simpler and more easily obtained.
Granted, I must concede that the wonders of market forces, propelled by sensate liberty, have been all-too-successful in their mission to drive down prices and drive up the availability of goods to people around the world. Their achievement there is undoubtedly impressive, and arguably positive insofar as it lifted much of the world out of extreme poverty.
However, that sensate liberty and the EGO it produces in our systems is also not at all sustainable in the long-term. Indeed, if the health of our social, economic, governmental, and environmental orders is to be maintained, we must allow natural forces to phase out our sensate thought for ideational thought
Sorokin described this ideational form of liberty, the opposite of our present sensate form, as follows:
“Ideational liberty is inner liberty, rooted in the restraint and control of our desires, wishes, and lusts. It is the liberty of Job with his imperturbable ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ Such a liberty does not multiply sensory wishes; it does not lead to an incessant struggle for an ever-increasing expansion of the means of their satisfaction — wealth, power, fame, and what not. It is little interested in political and civil rights, in the external guarantees of such rights, such as constitutions and political declarations. Its ‘kingdom is not of this world.’ On the other hand, it is inalienable — unconquerable by anybody or anything external.”
He labelled the most radical form of this ideational liberty as “ascetic liberty.”
Circling back to the initial point at hand — that is, why relationships are a more important currency than money itself — it is clear that our desire to be free, mixed with our present sensate conception of freedom, has led us down a path of rampant materialism, overconsumption, hoarding, and general greediness and avarice.
But as the sensate mode of our culture begins to disintegrate here in its twilight years, it naturally gives way to socially and spiritually regenerative idealistic and ideational eras. Such is the nature of our oscillatory historical and cultural progression, and for that, we ought to be thankful.
It is during this coming transition that we will come to realize the importance not of multiplying our material wants and needs, but of multiplying the valuable social relationships that can keep a community productively and meaningfully living without an embedded tilt towards excess.
Following an extensive meta-analysis of Western history, Sorokin concluded that civilizations phase their way in and out of three distinct cultural aspects: ideational, idealistic, and sensate. These three cultural forms shape the way in which we perceive and interact with the society around us. All three aspects have their benefits and their detriments, and ultimately serve to drive humanity forward, allowing humankind to collect different forms of truth and wisdom over the ages.
Sorokin said that the reason for the oscillation between systems is easily understood. No single system comprises the whole of truth; nor, on the other hand, is any one entirely false. Imperfect humans make imperfect systems that regardless of their imperfection, coalesce into a very real source of truth.
Ideational cultures view society “not [as] a conglomeration of various cultural objects, phenomena, and values, but [as] a unified system — a whole whose parts articulate the same supreme principle of true reality and value: an infinite, supersensory, and superrational God, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, absolutely just, good, and beautiful, creator of the world and of man… the only true reality.” Think of the culture of Medieval Eruope, or druidic or pagan societies.
In contrast, sensate cultures focus on the sensory, material world as opposed to the supersensory, spiritual world. It maintains a strict emphasis on empiricism and the “truth of the senses,” leading to the “progressive obliteration of the boundary line between sensory truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, validity and utilitarian convention.” Considering this, Sorokin argued that the sensate culture’s “temporalistic, relativistic, nominalistic, [and] materialistic traits lead to an increasing relativization of sensory truth until it becomes indistinguishable from error.”
Lastly, there is the idealistic culture that emerges in the time between sensate and ideational eras, a synthesis, a both-neither metaxy of the two systems. They occur during the transitory period between the other two aspects; for example, there was the ideational culture of Medieval Christian Europe (5th-15th Century), the idealistic culture of the Renaissance (15th-16th Century), and then lastly, the sensate culture of the Enlightenment and Modernity (16th Century-present).
While this lens of cyclical historical progression can be viewed as triadic, a pattern of three modes, it can also be viewed as an oscillation between two binary states — ideational and sensate — with the idealistic form being the balanced, middle-point of the oscillation. As cultural poles begin to shift back towards idealistic and ideational culture, and from sensate to ascetic liberty, so too will our approach to social relationships begin to shift.
The Three Types of Relationships
Just as there are different currencies, there are likewise different forms of social relationships. Understanding the various types and the impact they have on our culture and living conditions more broadly is essential to understanding how we may serve mankind more lovingly and more effectively moving forward.
Sorokin categorized social relationships into three dynamics: familistic, contractual, and compulsory. As the name suggests, “familistic relationships [are] permeated by mutual love, devotion, and sacrifice.” Contractual agreements are made for mutual but not shared benefit. And compulsory relationships are “imposed by one party upon the others, contrary to their wishes and interests.”
Familistic relationships are the noblest type in Sorokin’s view, being most similar to the selfless love of God Himself. He naturally places contractual relationships above compulsory ones because one is rooted in force and coercion while the other is not. However, Sorokin notes the significance of the differentiation between contractual and familistic relationships, that is, that the former lacks depth and holistic solidarity between parties, being limited and specified in their nature.
The rise of our great sensate culture has been most notably linked to the supremacy of contractual and compulsory relationships, reflected by the dominant modes of our political and economic thought, that being democracy, corporatism, and socialism. All of them rely heavily on the prevalence of contractual or compulsory relationships, lacking greatly in the production of familistic relationships and the benefits they bring.
To make the central point of this piece very clear, the active and concerted production of familistic relationships in one’s community and country is far more socially, economically, and politically valuable than any monetary policy out there.
The reason why relationships are a more valuable currency than money is because of all the secondary benefits that emerge from social transaction.
Trade itself is not possible without adequate amounts of social capital and loving energy between the individuals and groups in a society. Political processes and the designation of legitimate authority mean nothing if governance does not come from leaders who relate familistically to the masses, leaders whose sense of duty to protect and provide emerges from altruistic love and not a lust for power and wealth.
I have often made the argument that any political project rooted in achieving a non-violent social order must necessarily concern itself with structuring our families, communities, and countries around the maximization of familistic relationships and the productive, creative forces that they produce.
Politics may be inseparable from tribalism, from in-group/out-group competition and the friend/enemy distinction. Nevertheless, it is in our interest to focus more heavily on how we reap the benefits of friendship, of solidarity and social unity, to maximize the potential of our society and minimize our need to use violence to outcompete our adversaries.
So as our sensate cultural mode continues to disintegrate here in its twilight years, we must make an active effort to embrace the socio-historical shift towards idealistic and ideational culture, and as we do so, focus on developing household, local, and national structures that foster and promote the formation of familistic bonds.
Sorokin astutely observed that the formation of familistic relationships and productive, altruistic communities comes from efforts at a local level. Maintaining proper social infrastructure, shared values and common purpose are essential tasks for forming a community of “We” and not separate “I’s”
Fear not that this mission be anti-individual. In fact, nothing is more empowering for the individual than enabling in him the ability to form the most meaningful, creative, and loving bonds possible with those around him. Atomizing the individual into nothing more than a lone ego out to maximize their material possession and sensory experience in life is, in a word, cruel.
So go out into the world and begin to see every conversation, every blooming acquaintanceship, friendship, and romance as an opportunity to make some currency with a very real value: the currency of relationships with the value of active and creative love.
If one forges and maintains strong relationships towards those with whom they share their life, the ascetic form of liberty is much more easily accepted and practiced.
A life of simplicity — of accepted scarcity and want made bearable through the driving forces of altruistic, familistic relationships — is undoubtedly the most sustainable and effective path forward for mankind. And in a life of simplicity, the best deals are not made using the value of dollars, but of relationships.
