Worlding and the labour theory of value part one, or, 'Do it for the house.'

We'll take the owner of a new age business as our model. He ran a crystal, candle and incense shop for a decade, but had a hankering to run his own… —special personality cult. He tried grandstanding over a men's group for about the same time, but decided he needed more him than them. So, he sells the shop and buys a older weatherboard house, the worst house in the best street.

He lets rooms out out for yoga and alt-health practices, and gets his people to support the new centre dream by saying, "let's do it for the house."

By support I mean labour. Renovation labour. Hard graft and materials. BYO tools.

"Let's do it for the house."

You can imagine the dream he's selling. People help because they 'buy into the dream' which he never makes clear when saying, "let's do it for the house." Dreams are traditionally not clear but that's often a good thing. Perhaps we should call dreaming something else, like worlding, this would make it harder to use it as cover for theft and fraud.

“Let's do it for the house”.

As if people’s good will, their volunteer hours, if not materials and wear & tear on their tools, is all going to a good cause… —but if it was made clear, instead of smokecreeened, then it would clearly mean it was going into his pocket. He had form on this.

His financial acumen was developed as a shopkeeper. In those new-agey store days, we would hear him complain about people who volunteered to work at the counter for him, in the usual narcissistic denigration of someone not in the room. Narcissists hate their marks.

Good people, who do things simply to better the world.

Anyway, to cut a very long story short, all this only becomes clear when he suddenly feels a change in vocation and sells the house. I guess he did that for the house as well. He makes a substantial profit. The yoga peeps and practitioners have nowhere to go. It just sort of happens to the good people.

Poof.

Now this is a story about a low affect psychopath who surfed the feelings of new-agey airheads who he specialised in being a parasite on. You can call it conniving and Machiavellian, but taking advantage of people’s good nature is mostly done unconsciously by narcissists semi-consciously, a bit like breathing. Sure you can be conscious of your breath, but maybe that only for the yoga peeps.

For a narcissist it is just the way of the world, in which self=world. Or, even less differentiated than that, they are sweorlfd.

The wider story, is the framing around that which the narcissists cannot see at all, nor understand, let alone empathise with. I.E. the rest of us good people. The world is a creation of empathy. It might be a dream, a romancing the life of us, but it also includes the real world, which is what people create in supplying their labour, effort, time, as well as their good cheer, when the narcissist riffs on 'doing it for the house.'

Even in the market when negotiating a price we do this. The market is part of the world. Negotiating is part of worlding, it means being clear about your dreamy hopes and… —worlding.

Both positions, the people of good will and the narcissist, are about values important to them, but helping narcissists is not worth doing. Be careful out there.

Also, if you get scammed by them, at some point, you can put down to ‘life experience’, eventually¸ —when you feel a certain equanimity about being ripped-off, scammed, defrauded… —and moving on in a healthy way… — but REMEMBER there is still an opportunity cost if that narcissist has not been policed.

He’ll move on from the shop, to the house, to the deal, to the world. You may have saved your souls, but there is a world of souls out there.

That is the frame we need to deal with in worlding, not just our personal stories moving on from arseholes, like an adult adulting.

Afterall we are not all adults, not at first.

That's why we also need to police the sweorlfd among us. Each and everyone of us.