Finding Your Philosophical
Statement : The Principle Thing in the Marketplace -
Just one thing has got me tripping. -- Amerie
These days one hears talk about the marketplace in the strang-
est places. For example, amongst the most intense movements
on the fringe of Global Christianity you’ll hear about the mar-
ketplace. Also, across the spectrum into the planning rooms in
the pinnacles of Arab Islamist wealth you can hear talk of the
new ‘Jihad economics’, fighting for the Islamic way of life not
with mortar rounds but corporations like Al Jazeera, Emirates
and other emerging global leaders. “Talking about a revolu-
tion in sounds and whispers” as Tracey Chapman so eruditely
sang. Whether it’s politics, religious circles, special ethnic or
cultic interest groups or alternate lifestyle crusaders, the focus
for today’s battle for supremacy, for power and influence, is in-
disputably the marketplace. Even where the pen is recognised
as being mightier than the sword, the pen is urged to resort to
the arena of the marketplace to find its might. Maybe it’s the
days we’re living in.
Just One Thing?
In the middle of this year, I had the good fortune to hear some
of the latest ideas of David Paul Mavia of The Kairos. He spoke
about the “needful thing” and the “lacking thing”, proposing
that in almost every arena of endeavour there’s a “one thing”
that if done, guarantees accomplishment of the objective.
Pointing out that this “one thing” leads to other things or opens
up into other things, he suggested that when the one thing is
lacking, no matter what other things are done, the goal will not
by Sal Kitololo
be attained. He urged then, that individuals take time to look
for their one thing.
This idea echoes of Kierkegaard’s “To Will One Thing”, where
he suggests that one ought to look for that one thing that de-
fines her or his life, the one central defining principle for the
individual. I would extend this idea not just to individuals but
to collectives as well and to every kind of enterprise. Perhaps
a group gathered around the pursuit of an objective have no
defining principle. In such a case there is some sort of amor-
phous or unspoken philosophical foundation for the gathering
but because it is unarticulated it comes through only through
the groups culture and actions. By this I mean to say that ev-
ery individual and every group has some sort of philosophical
compass but these are rarely conscious or deliberate, and for
this reason inconsistency and inability to reach conclusively for
the objective occurs. In other words to borrow from Mavia’s
idea, they do everything but the one thing and so end up at
nothing.
The Nature of the Marketplace
So based on this idea of one thing, a principle or needful thing,
let us examine the marketplace. The nature of the market-
place if simplified and abstracted is one of supply and demand.
Wherever supply and demand meet and exchange takes place
can be identified as a market. Further, we can say that the
marketplace is the broad or general sphere where these kinds
of economic activities of supplying, demanding and exchang-
ing take place. Of course today’s marketplace has no physical
location; the market reality envelops all of life or human expe-
rience. Today’s market is virtual or physical, uses monetary
or non-monetary currencies[1] and happens wherever com-
munication can occur, and in the digital world we live in, that
is nearly everywhere. So the marketplace isn’t a place, it’s a
way of thinking where exchange is welcome. However for our
purposes we’ll limit our examination to the commercial aspect
of the market – the marketplace of economic exchange. This is
what most people will mean by the word ‘marketplace’.
The marketplace, commercially speaking, is where value is ex-
changed that can be directly translated into monetary terms.
Skills, gifts, knowledge and insight are traded (exchanged) in
this arena every day. Much human ambition today pegs its
hopes on this arena of activity. It is the true ‘Field of Dreams’.
The Necessity of Transcendental Intrusions into the
Market
The nature of the commercial or economic marketplace is
buying and selling or demand and supply. For there to be a
market in today’s realities, demand and supply must meet and
agree on exchange. For this reason, the market is a de facto
closed system with decision and direction governed mainly by
the presence of demand. Where there is no demand the whole
market system falls. Demand calls out supply and profit occurs
in the gap between cost of supply and exchange price. The
system is locked in a dance of death where demand-creation
becomes the primary source of growth. For this reason, the
marketing function is glorified and even deified: advertising
makes something out of nothing – demand is created and sub-
sequently the market grows.
The market then becomes a spiritual power, a pseudo-god,
with marketers as its high priests and prophets. It is global
mass-media marketing that speaks things that are not as if
they were and gives life to the dead. This secular deity op-
erates by its own logic of glory, fame and the bestowing of
fortunes in the marketplace. In return the Market controls
everyone in its domain by forcing obedience to demand. The
customer is king. And the heart of the king is in the hand of
the god through its mouthpiece, mass-media marketing. Any
deviation from the will of the demand side is punished with
economic failure, shame and infamy – one becomes a pariah
of the Market. This closed system, therefore, allows no free-
dom to the people who operate in it. It has internal laws and
these must be followed.
This introduces the necessity of what we can identify as ‘tran-
scendental intrusions’. Every closed system operates by its
own internal logic, and this internal law directly translates into
the tyranny of the system’s deified principle. For human beings
then to subvert and bring into submission these closed sys-
tems – such as the Market and the marketplace – they require
a logic superior to the internal law of the system. This can be
identified as a transcending logic, a logic that intrudes from
outside the system. It is precisely this transcending logic that
becomes the one thing with respect to the marketplace. To re-
peat: the principle thing or needful thing for anyone operating
in the marketplace is a logic from outside the system of buying
and selling, a logic that supersedes the dominion of demand in
the Market.
This one thing or needful thing differs for different individuals
or groups but can always be summarised as a guiding logos or
‘governing statement’. We can go further and say we’re talk-
ing about a philosophical statement, because as we’ll see, this
statement is always an argument or reasoning that claims to
pull down the imaginations and high things of the deified Mar-
ket. Every triumphant economic endeavour has discovered
just such a guiding logos as we’ll see below in the examples,
and for different enterprises the statement is different. In every
case though, the statement is “non-economic” if you like – it’s
a statement of belief, of philosophy.
[1] Sometimes we pay, not money but attention. Other currencies are time,
sweat, blood, tears and other fluid or liquid human capacities that can be
exchanged and valued. Every true exchange in ‘the marketplace’ is an ex-
change of estimations of human value. Every glory is capable of ‘market-
isation’ or commercialisation, that is, capable of being bought and sold.
adopted for www.bc.co.ke