Look who I came to learn this interesting concept from, orangutans. Reading online I found this gem “the orangutans, unlike any other known species, apart from humans, are capable of ‘calculated reciprocity’, which involves tracking the exchange of goods between two individuals over time”.
Wow! how many interesting things we can learn from the wonderful expressions that life invented, viruses, bacteria, plants, animals and humans, I said to myself.
We, humans, have been induced to conceive the economy just from logical and mathematical schemes, which were imposed to us. The problem is that, in order to homogenize the language, we must forget about the people and the world that substrates it. The matter was directed only in terms of individual wellness and the optimization of utility by “rational” autonomous agents, looking to show that those knowledges and interests don’t change although the scenario does. The little virus, as I call Covid-19, came to stay and make us take into consideration the existence “others and other” in the hegemonic notions of economy. Those that don’t incorporate the design of economic politics that govern us.
The relationship between living beings are the ones that give structure to economic facts; that implies the co-existence of multiple standards of value that require to recognize the paradox of diversity inside and apparent uniformity, a little bit complicate, however, here I remember the new concept of “value” of my partner Carlos Pereira, who is also a psychologist: Arbitrary, objective or subjective, dimension that we give to everything that we relate to, to show how reciprocity and collaboration emerges from our capacity to give value to people, relationships, and things that we exchange to get the benefit from everything mentioned previously, that’s what I learned from orangutans, calculated reciprocity. I invite you all to re-think the economy taking advantage of what our platform offers.
