On Value and Price

Market logic teaches that anything offered for free must be worthless.

Experience swiftly contradicts such an assertion, and yet, market logic often rules: just consider the estimated value of “housework” or “homemaking” that, for decades, went unremunerated and treated as, at best, a ‘’lesser” form of work, as though such a concept made any sort of sense…

Some of my writing is offered freely because philosophy cannot flourish under market conditions: to be effective, it must be given, not sold. This will eventually include all my undergraduate papers, selected essays of significance either personal or polemical, and some experiments in fiction-as-philosophy.

Yet the core of my most valuable work, valuable to me, carries a modest price. Partly because I like to eat, but partly because ideas that cost nothing are too easily treated as if they are worth nothing. I laboured for this value and intend to see it considered such, even if only nominally.

This small fee is not a demand for tribute to my brilliance but an embodiment of a lesson we all do well to recall daily: that how we think, choose, and act matters as much as what we conclude, how we are perceived and what judgements or consequences may proceed therefrom.  Value is not imposed upon us but an act or societal complicity; participation may not be optional, but the terms are negotiable.