The language of the market

Have you noticed how commercial, how financial, how economic our language has become? I'm not talking about the simple fact that things like the stock market have their own shows when they really don't deserve to be talked about at all. No, I'm talking about the shift in tone, attitude, and impact that a general change in vocabulary brings with it.

For example, as noted last time, we don't talk about "careers" or even "employment" anymore, we only talk about "jobs". The first two terms has some longevity, some continuity to them, but the last one doesn't. Or how about a phrase like "ownership of learning"? What's owned? What was wrong with motivation? Everyone knows that to get ahead in life or to succeed anywhere, you have to "pay your dues". We no longer ask people to support our causes, we have to get them to "buy in". Goals have become "targets", effort is now an "investment". We don't give up, we "sell out". We no longer have people working for us, we have "human capital"; we no longer have reputations, we have "social capital". The most fundamental reason for something is now "the bottom line". Citizens have been reduced to "consumers". Schools and government agencies now have "customers" too. Is this really necessary?

The words we use, whether we like it or not, say more about us than most of us are aware. Our everyday discourse has been turned into an economic exchange. We have reduced our vocabulary, and consequently our thinking, to merely economic terms. Language, which was once considered a social medium, is now more of an economic medium: as I've said before, we gave up our society for an economy. I don't think it was a "good deal", it wasn't a step along the road to progress.

There is more to life than just money, and there is more to the interactions among human beings than the market. When we forget that, we run the risk of reducing everyone and everything to an object of exchange ... yes, an object ... a commodity, something that can be bought and sold like anything else. I once took silent and humble pride in the fact that I belonged to the species homo sapiens, the one creature on earth who not only knew about instinctual interaction but higher, nobler, more meaningful interactions as well. The biologists did their best to reduce us to just clever animals, but what's even worse is our degradation to the simplified, somewhat crippled homo economicus.

Our lives aren't the richer for it. There may be more money floating around than there once was, but there's no real indication that most of us are happier or really leading better, higher quality lives because of it. If it didn't work in economics where it had its greatest chance, why would we think that chasing after that less happy model in the other areas of our lives would have more success? Oh yeah, I forgot, we dropped that sapiens thing, didn't we?