"Not Just Anyone" Ethics; Capitalism, Classism and the Weaponization of Mediocrity

“Not Just Anyone” Ethics; Capitalism, Classism and the Weaponization of Mediocrity

Imagine this scenario. You’re at a restaurant, let’s say a pizza joint. There’s a pretty cashier, but you’re not impressed. However, it’s obvious your friend is. You’re paying for your supposed friend. When it’s time to get change, your friend suddenly says something interesting that distracts you. You paid with a $50 and are owed a $40. However, what’s handed to you is the cost of the pizza, a $10. You’re really caught up in the conversation, and when it’s over you look at the ten. Wow, that’s a lot of money gone. Your friend is making eye contact with the cashier, and the cashier is making eye contact with the forty left behind. You grimace. “You gave me a ten, not forty. That’s clearly not enough.” The cashier blinks as if coming back into reality, smiles and hands the correct change, as if somehow relieved that the correct change was given out. “Enjoy your day guys.” The day goes well, as you can imagine, it has pizza. But the friendship of course doesn’t, as you can also imagine.

This happens in finance all the time. Let’s analyze.

Let’s start with “not just anyone” ethics. What does this mean? When a price is hiked, or artificially raised, it can be practically extortion. As quality goes up with funding, we see the inherent mechanisms of capitalism at play. “You get what you pay for.” But when we put things in ratio, aka someone’s twenty when they only have twenty in the bank, it is quite a different twenty that someone’s twenty when they have a million. The whole process reflects an impoverished understanding. We see again and again professionals who will not give their best when pay is not increased, as they genuinely do not feel they have anything to lose. Lawyers ask, “Can you pay for it?” What’s the it that’s paid for? You don’t even get invites to certain societies unless your reportable income on file states a certain number. We may recognize intelligence is a function of wealth, but that doesn’t change that access to intelligence remains interlocked in the hegemony of wealth — despite this being an intelligent observation. Reputation doesn’t matter, nor does integrity. Income is the name of the day.

Now let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Though this is wise when unionized and there is a history of wage theft — one should not reward a pathological employer with excellence — it’s when it continues in the compensated upper echelons, decrying that one does not have money or is oppressed, yet refusing to filter down any compensations rewarded due to access to generous and comparatively efficient upper-middle classes in an effective manner to the supposed victims of oppression. Yep, you guessed it, to each class, its own narcissist.

Now let’s say there’s more to this story. Let’s say that because of such artificial price hikes, individuals want the premier treatment but do not have access to it. In this case, this is when our pizza joint scenario happens — by taking up the time of someone with the means, the individual is able to quickly distribute it before the distribution is apprehended. Many people consider this lack of apprehension to be equivalent to lack of ownership, as when someone can not remember and identify ongoing transactions, relationships, and mutual movements then they are not possessed by the person at hand. Ledgers, records and chains.

However, when I apprehend that I was given the signifier of cost ($10) but void of the actual accurate difference between payment and cost — aka, when I am told $10 and receive $10 back as a reflection instead of a balance (the accurate balancing operation would result in $40), I can state and prove financial malpractice has occurred and that there has not been an equitable exchange and receive my money back, despite the attempts at signification without materialist backing. For more on how distributions are not in themselves the full picture of financial intelligence, please read my story from yesterday under the name Sadistic Socializations, Inaccuracies of Self Worth, and Combatting the Synthetic Atrocity.

The underlying message that it doesn’t matter if one thing is worth four times more than another thing if the evaluator possesses nothing but debt. What does matter is if the person with a positive position does not evaluate this individual highly and is unwilling to lend due to a continued trend of transactions with weak integrity, poor understanding and the unwillingness to get better. As they can say, “You can always get your own money back.” Get better, indeed.

Now let’s think about this pizza situation from a different perspective. Let’s say that this person needed access to intelligent material but had no means to pay for it. This would be a good way to borrow and get insight, even if it was taken away. Even just exposure accumulates. Though this may cause the cashier to heighten their evaluation due to materialist backing (they received the stolen $40), the corrective security process of my taking my owed due, when written on a ledger, may seem like a costly interchange for the cashier; -$40, when it fact it was corrective not transactional. Yet, despite the fact finance has no way of qualifying these things, this would also go towards the individual’s financial credit, qualifying them as an individual possessing means.

We see then, that intel and exposure, are values unto themselves, and keeping intel and exposure to a minimum is part of the security element that keeps exploitative practices such as weaponized mediocrity to create artificial prices hikes in place.

We see then that the person who mis-distributed my money was not necessarily solidly attributing value, insofar as they were gaining access with money they did not have proof — and therefore — possession of. They were doing a relatively respectable thing; getting oneself out of poverty when even the fellow impoverished will not hand you keys to such a thing. For more on identifying such relationships, see our article on lose-lose.

The lesson then, is that behind value is security, and validating security is value, etc. And of course, we know the fun little h word for this; hegemony. See it under its pseudonym, “Money pays money, not people.”

In short, years ago I had shared some of the pizza pie, but the person on the other side of it was not my friend. We will go later into this notion in the following piece on retributive justice and following that we will analyze repressive mechanisms as means to distribute unaffordable hostility.