A fair deal

One of the first tools we need to be able to deploy in our mental armoury is the concept of the 'balanced transaction'.

It is evident from the principles of natural justice that if you do me a favour, I owe you a favour in return. If I do you a service then I resonably expect a comparable service from you. This is something which has helped the cohesiveness of our society, and if we did not have this feature in our makeup we would not be the social animals we are.

If I go out on the hunt, you look after my children. In return, you get a choice piece of the kill when we return. Swings and roundabouts. Fair play.

This gets interesting, of course, when we try to estimate and agree on the comparative worth of the two pieces in the transaction. It's simple to think one apple equates to one pear. But consider if you live in Britain, how many apples equate to one peach. The thing is, apples are reasonable common in Britain. So how many of them would I need to trade them for a peach grown under special conditions or from another country.

The answer is not simple to factor out (length of growing time, transport costs, freshness, bulk discount and so on), but can be determined between the parties to the negotiation quite simply by looking at things like sourcing it elsewhere (the scarcity or uniqueness of the product), the intrinsic appeal of the product, the time I have available to investigate other options, and so on.
What this comes down to is whether I feel I am getting a good deal - whether I feel there is a balance in this transaction.

Now the concept of balanced transaction applies in all areas of interaction with others. It is one of the marks of our improving culture that instead of saying, for example, that if a person commits murder they too should be executed - an eye for an eye - that we can instead balance the transaction and say instead that the murder should serve a prison sentence.

In an everyday sense, however we like to feel that we are getting more out than we put in - this magic ingredient and the whole meal is transformed. That new bauble and I will be happy. A little bit of typing and suddenly out pops something which looks like a typeset document with full brochure, courtesy of our new marketing software.

The thing is that deep down we are not fooled.

As the time taken for production reduces, the effort and emotional input from us decreases towards zero. As a result of the improvements in production, the number of items produced increases towards infinity. As the number of items in our in-tray or letterbox approches infinity our time available to deal with them decreases to zero. So the less effort in production, the more rubbish there is and the less time there is to look at it. Mass produced products in infinite variety overload our capacity to absorb and be interested.

But when we see something hand-crafted, heart-felt, unique and personally and recognisably designed for us, we will pay attention. It is our personal intervention, our care and yes, our passion (despite the business world hijacking that word and, through overuse, diminishing its true meaning) which will imbue what we do and give it true uniqueness, value and meaning in our lives.