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The Gift: Chapter 5 - The Gift Community

🕑 Added 2025-06-23 19:50:01 +0000 UTC

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benedict.m

i'm reading the straggler comments!!! no shame plz the gift comes around if & when it can & no sooner. very frustrated reading about your wealthier friend. my partner pretty recently went through an ugly breakup w a friend who was much more well off than them & also (coincidentally??) cared (and complained!) a lot more about money than them. the actual break wasn't about money, but there were several preceding conflicts about how this friend was incredibly obtuse & shitty about money. just bringing this up for absolutely no reason and not making any predictions about your long term future with your rich friend. . . . . . . "Don't we often need a reminder that the world is good so long as we are good in it?" so so True so so Valuable, and not in some woo-woo manifest-y way either. just in the way that how u think the world is affects how you behave, which affects how the world ACTUALLY is. I also feel for you in the realization of an able body being a huge resource that's usually taken for granted. I think disability is super relevant to the ideas this book is dealing with: under capitalist market exchange logic, treatment of people w disabilities gets real bad real fast, because they "can't" "contribute" "as much" as able bodied ppl. but in a community / society with a gift ethos, people w disabilities simply have an "emptier bowl" in some ways, into which surplus wealth & value must flow, so that they can keep contributing the gifts they have access to. (feel a little weird making broad claims about disability & society, esp cause i'm not sure where i personally stand in that. i'm able bodied in most ways but have realized in the past couple years that certain things about my body are not uhhh "normal" per se and i require some active maintenance to stay able bodied. tl;dr to u or anyone else reading, i'm just waxing here, not tryna make blanket statements about a group i have no involvement in.) anyway, i hope you can find a way to still give the time and resources you do have, and still let yourself receive what others are able to give to u. stragglers unite i'll see u in the next one whenever we get there!!1!!

Seoyoung Park

Oof... This chapter hit so hard this week... I've been dealing with a really heavy heart this week because I had an immensely difficult conversation with a friend who was much much wealthier than me. I hadn't venmod them for about five meals we'd eaten together over the course of two-ish months, and i recently mentioned that I'd forgotten to venmo request them, to which they were like "i thought that was u paying me back for my helping you move." It is 100% true that they helped me move in tremendous and moving ways, and it is also 100% true that their mom pays for all their bills, gives them allowance, they don't pay rent, and they have literally never worked a day in their life. I was so aghast I didn't say anything at the time, and it's because you just cannot do anything about covetousness! I have been fastidious in all my relationships never EVER to ask for monetary reciprocity from friends who have less money than me, to the extent that in wealthier times in my life, i have outrightly refused people paying me back. i feel, so deeply, that if u r wealthy it is a debt u have towards the society that uve unfairly received money from. i have seen reciprocity in so many myriads of ways, but i've never invited a monetary reciprocal vacuum in a relationship where one of us has orders of magnitude more (or even 10k more). One of the major facets of my friendships with my network of friends is that we are all EXTREMELY transparent about our finances, which helps us all account for how we can care for each other. I have a friend who sends me $20 when i have a hard day because they make 5x what I make, and i have friends that i make extra food for (so they can take some home) when they come over. i think there's a lot of unease in my millenial circles (plz confirm if this is true millenials) about transparency with wealth than in my zoomer circles. the extreme transparency can only happen when u look at wealth as an absurd quantity that nobody is entitled too, though. money HAS to be a mysterious quantity that just HAPPENS to make it into some pockets and HAPPENS not to reach others. I have noticed throughout our friendship that they didn't grow up with generosity as one of the core tenets of being a Good Person, and in fact they pride themselves on holding extremely rigid boundaries between self and other instead. This, I guess, is the price of generational wealth, as in the Flat's story. You don't acquire generational wealth during a time in Korea where people didn't have running water nor toilets in their home by taking everyone else up with you. I grew up in a home where my dad paid off his friend's student loans for him, and made it an interest-less loan, so that his friend could go to school and still provide for his family (of note: my dad also cut me off when i was 18, so idk how that squared for him lmfao) I was talking to a friend recently (he is a PK/MK and i have two generations of pastors going back in my family), and we were discussing the lord's prayer. He was advocating for a staunchly materialist analysis of the lord's prayer: "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." along with trespasses. He was saying that in line with the sermon on the mount, this verse pointed to a Deeply Christian idea of letting economic debts not lie fallow in our fields. Instead, freeing ourselves of the "legal binds" that enforce erotic relations. I've been thinking a lot about how i have become a person who nickels and dimes affections. Some of this, I think, has been partly that i've been surrounded by a large quantity of people who are covetous with their time in a way that i've never been. It is much easier to be a giver in a community of givers, where the reciprocity is always plentiful, and none of us feel afraid of being taken advantage of. Another large part of this, i think, has been due to my past year of bed boundness, during which i became nearly completely unintelligible to all my friends. I felt that the sheer force of my doing things: literally just getting out of bed to get dinner with someone, was not understood as the great feat it was, and i started to feel a sense of jealousy over my own time and energy. In doing this, i've lost the luxury of an able body-- the capacity to see the world as a wealth of resources opening up to you at any time. You only have a community so much as u can go out and meet them, and only so many people are willing to be active friends with u when u r essentially a fucking vegetable. Before becoming a disabled body, i felt the abundance of the world like a lived reality, rather than a chosen philosophy. I felt it as much as i used to know the presence of God was in my heart. When you become disabled, I think the world closes off to you quite a lot because of the commodification of health and care work in America. <"the spirit of the gift shuns exactness and because gifts do not necessarily move reciprocally (and therefore do not produce the adversary roles of creditor and debtor)"> In Korean there's a phrase "mirror therapy," which is what they call it when one sees someone else acting the way you act, and suddenly you're like "oh my god... i'm disgusting and i must change my life." This chapter really made me think about the material circumstances that enable a gift economy and also the psychological will towards seeing Good in everyone around you. I use this metaphor often in my personal life (and at the risk of this starting to sound like a bible study meeting), as I was reading this chapter, I once again, found myself naked in the face of GodTM. I suddenly realised my "nakedness" in the form of my protectiveness over myself leading me to be stingy with my time and resources, in front of God (the only form of accountability towards a cosmic good is The Community now). To search for exactness in relationships, and settled scores is to seek isolation... Koreans are very exact people when it comes to gift debt. We make sure we are not a penny or a toe over the line, and we do not ask favours without thinking first about the burdens we are putting on other people. This is the way one must live in a collectivist&capitalist society: if u ask for everything to people who want to give people will have nothing left. This withholding is considered a set of manners on its own. Because of this, i think, we're also trying to parse what debts we owe and are owed all the time, but as i was reading this quote i just couldn't think anything but, "what a fucking miserable way to live." So many thoughts surrounding this chapter, but I feel a bit teary eyed. Don't we often need a reminder that the world is good so long as we are good in it? I remember being Christian and having the profound belief that whatever gifts i gave to the community would return to me tenfold by Jesus. I don't believe in Jesus like that anymore. My exchanges need to come from a place of deciding the type of person I want to be in the world, without any guarantees of cosmic return, and only the promise that when i die i won't regret how close i kept to myself. My reflections for this chapter were much more spiritual and not as much lending itself towards productive epistemic discourse, methinks. No one is reading these straggler comments anyway, so I relinquish feeling bad about that, and imma go comment on ur posts lol I've been feeling such shame about being succcccch a fucking LAGGER for this cycle, but AH!!! the universe provides once again. Everything that's meant to come upon me will come upon me at the right time, so long as I continue seeking it... Much love to everyone who's reading my comments :') I'm so touched. Thank you SO FUCKING MUCH to CJ for the 2 month hiatus. I would have just quit as soon as i fell behind without this lag... <3333 such gifts in the world

benedict.m

((((tangent about rowing: "When you're rowing a big boat with a crew, you are kind of less-than-human and more-than-human, your full individuality suppressed but social identity and accomplishment emerging out of the collective." (CJ) this was kind of just a throwaway comment but it's an extremely good example of the relationship between individuals & community. an 8-person boat (the only kind I've rowed on) moves fast as FUCK when it really gets going. this isn't so much about the strength of the individual rowers as their technique and more than anything, their coordination. if u don't know, on a boat like this the rowers are facing backwards, *pulling* their oars through the water rather than *pushing* the water back like you do on a kayak or a canoe. the only person facing the direction the boat is traveling is the coxswain, who doesn't row but steers using a rudder and helps coordinate the pace of the rowers. boat moves this way->->->-> cox - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 -> <- <- <- <- <- <- <- <- everybody's got a role, and depending on various traits you're more suited to one spot or another on the boat. for a coxswain you want a tough, tiny motherfucker with a loud voice. the 1 seat has to be someone extremely consistent with great technique, because they're the only rower that everyone else can see, and the only one who can't see any other rower. they're setting the pace even more than the cox does. the 7 and 8 seats need to be powerful and *extremely* attentive to the pace of the rowers "in front" of them, because they're essentially the geese at the front of the V. they're breaking the water first, and everyone in front of them is riding their slipstream (I only rowed for one year I'm using my own terminology stfu). the differences between the 2-6 seats aren't quite as pronounced. everyone is sat so close together that you HAVE to move back and forth at the same time, or you're gonna hit someone. if you're not used to how this all feels, it's exhilarating and honestly terrifying when the boat really gets moving. you can feel the way your own power is being multiplied by the other people in the boat with you. you're watching the back of the person in front of you, trying to match your movement exactly to theirs. you're taking all the training you've done on the erg (rowing machine) and applying it to a distinctly non-machine, non-theoretical environment, contending with the uneven surface of the water, wind whipping around you, the rocking of the narrow boat, the physical noise of your fellow rowers. when you're all in sync, when everyone's in a place they're suited to, you can get into this state that's almost like spiritual ecstasy. you get subsumed in the collective and you're moving like a machine, but also aware that it is YOUR efforts that allow the subsuming to happen. I hope you can feel how apt this analogy is for community in general, but in case you still need convincing: sometimes if you get out of sync, or your technique is a little off--or just if the water is too rough and you fail to adjust properly--the paddle of your oar can catch on the water rushing past you. this is called catching a crab, and it's fucking awful. the handle of your oar flies back, hitting you in the chest and pushing you onto your back; sometimes people even get knocked out of the boat altogether. even if you don't, usually you need the help of the person behind you to get the paddle out of the water, because your oar will be almost parallel to the boat at this point, held down by the speed of the water you're moving through. it *feels* like the water's grabbed your oar and doesn't want to let go. once you do get it out, no matter how bruised up and shaken you are, all you can do is try to fall back in step, hopefully with better technique and timing than before. but a lot of times, once you catch one crab you're likely to catch another. it's something that happens to everyone, hopefully less and less as you get more experienced, but no one is immune to it. it's a small mistake by one person that disrupts the pace and coordination of the whole group, sometimes irreparably. at least for that race. there's always the next one.)))) this wasn't super necessary but hey, hardly anyone's reading these older threads rn anyway. i was just struck by how incredibly apt a metaphor this was. i'm sure any team sport would do, but idk if any team sport is characterized as strongly by group cohesion and synchronization as rowing crew. maybe synchronized swimming. is that a sport? or a form of dance? is dance a sport? you decide!!

benedict.m

“There’s no simple moral [to this chapter] because there’s no simple way to resolve the conflict between community and individual advancement, a conflict that accounts for so much of our political and ethical life” (99). but I'm still gonna get into some shit! ~~|p+o+l+i+t+i+c+s|~~ I’ve been trying to find a good way to sum up the broad political philosophies of “Right” and “Left” for a while now. I liked something Jaron Lanier said in YANAG about how the left is broadly concerned with widening circles of empathy, expanding the pool of people you consider yourself to be responsible for, while the right is broadly concerned with narrowing those circles. that rings true to me, but not quite True enough. doesn’t feel like it’s quite getting to the core of things. but this— “One temperament feels kinship with the aborigine while the other feels distance; one temperament assumes generosity while the other assumes a lust for power; for one our passions are social, for the other they are selfish. . .One temperament assumes that goodwill underlies social life, while the other assumes egotism (and so must add reason and authority to derive society).” (119) —this feels like a True definition of Left and Right. not as specific political ideologies or policies but as broader philosophies, approaches /to/ political thought. the guiding principles determining the specific ideologies & policies you end up fucking with. these things aren’t up for rational debate in the same way that specific political policies might be—I’m willing to argue with someone about the most effective way to provide housing for unhoused people, because that’s logistical and complicated and I doubt any one person has the objective right answer. but I’m not out here trying to rationally persuade someone to simply believe that unhoused people /should/ have housing. you can’t rationally persuade someone out of the myopic worldview that people are evil and self-serving at their core, and I really like the language Hyde puts to this broad philosophical divide. another way I like to sum it up is this: do people need to be controlled, or do people need to be supported? you may notice that using this terminology, the american democratic party wouldn’t really fall into the Left category! at least since the 90s when democrats started going all tOuGh oN cRiMe, they’ve been heavily aligned with the worldview that “assumes egotism,” “a lust for power,” and the absolute necessity of authority. it’s gross actually. lame, unimaginative, boring, ugly. much cooler to believe in people (source: new Superman movie). maybe there used to be more actual Leftism somewhere in american politics, but honestly i doubt it. hypothesis: [--------left--------][-------right-------] “un-electable” [-dem-][----rep----] lmk if this makes any sense i only know how to think in diagrams ~~|a+n+a+r+c+h+i+s+m|~~ “...anarchism [is] not a politics per se but more of an application of ethics to political thought. Anarchist theory is like an aqua regia applied to the state and its machinery to see how much might be stripped away before people begin to suffer more than they do under law and authority.” (118) love this definition. I’ve felt anarchic ideas hovering at the edge of Hyde’s writing for a while now, so it’s satisfying to see him come right out and say “Gifts are best described...as anarchist property” (110). I don’t know of many ideas that are as thoroughly misunderstood as anarchism is. this has a lot to do with straight-up propaganda—at least in the US anarchism has gotten the communism treatment for a long time—but it’s also telling that people hear “anarchism opposes all hierarchy” and seem to interpret that as “anarchism opposes all structure.” not surprising that in the west we cannot imagine any kind of structure & organization to society that doesn’t involve hierarchy and rule over other people!! very silly. gift economies are organized, they have “a felt cohesiveness” (114), a sense of “equilibrium and coherence, a kind of anarchist stability” (97), but do not involve hierarchy. society =/= hierarchy!! anarchy =/= chaos!!! let’s be more imaginative please. a little while ago I got into a political argument with a friend in which they said that any political structure that isn’t democracy is fascism. this is a fucking wild thing to say, but I don’t think it’s a thought that just came from them; it’s a very american thought, one we’re pretty explicitly encouraged to think. in america communism is fascism because you don’t get to be a full radical libertarian individual. but “[i]ndividualism in a gift economy inheres in the right to decide when and how to give the gift. The individual controls the flow of property away from him (rather than toward him, a different individualism)” (103). multiple different forms of individual identity and agency??? not in my country. this quote reminds me of an anecdote that may not actually be true, idk. but supposedly, in the process of creating the United Nations (lowkey fucked organization btw) there was debate about whether to define a universal set of human rights, or a universal set of human responsibilities. one is about what you are owed, the other what you owe to everyone else. in theory, these should have the same end result if they’re actually taken seriously, but the flavor of them is very different. if everyone knows they have a right to certain things, who is providing those things? we’re all just walking around talking about what we’re owed. but if those same things are framed as duties, things we owe everyone else, suddenly we know where they’re coming from. “...the process of law. . .requires, to begin with, adversaries and reckoning, both of which are excluded by the spirit of gift exchange” (115). a lot of people would frame this in the reverse: the existence of adversaries and the necessity of reckoning requires the process of law. but Hyde is right and Hobbes is dumb. what’s dumb about it is not that human conflict doesn’t exist, or that people don’t act as villains or “adversaries” sometimes. what’s dumb and self-defeating to me is the creation of a /class/ of adversaries, “criminals” as an identity. this is what people always say, right, like “what about the murderers, what about the fundamentally Bad Actors in society,” as if that’s a type of person, rather than a state anyone enters when they do a murder or a Bad Action. it creates a hierarchy, a comfortable separation between adversaries and you, a normal person. also deeply love the idea that “[i]n a gift economy. . .things are treated in some degree as persons and vice versa. Person and thing, the quick and the dead, are distinguished spiritually, not rationally” (110). this hierarchical binary between person and thing is so fundamental, but any specific place where you draw that line gets weird real fast. between people and other animals? here comes factory farming. between living organisms and non-living organisms? good luck finding that line. between things we care about and things we don’t? who’s the “we”? ~~|m+i+s+c+e+l+l+a+n+e+o+u+s|~~ some beautiful Kwaikiutl names: “Satiating,” “Always Giving Blankets While Walking,” “Creating Trouble All Around.” (102) “If the recipients of his ideas are not going to treat them as gifts, he will not give them as gifts.” (101) REAL. IMPORTANT. recognize when your gifts are being treated as commodities and consider not giving them to the same people / in the same way anymore!! “Our feelings close down when the numbers get too big. Strangers passing on the street in big cities avoid each other’s eyes not to show disdain but to keep from being overwhelmed by excessive human contact.” (116) strongly disagree with this actually. I ranted in response to Chandler a few weeks ago about how Hyde is wrong to assume that emotion-based community has an inherent numerical upper limit, so you’re welcome to read that. but without spoiling anything, he actually is very critical of similar ideas coming from Luther in Chapter 7, so I do retract some of my assumptions about Hyde’s assumptions. but having spent a lot of time in new york over the last few years, I think the reasons people avoid eye contact in big cities are far more complicated than Hyde is saying here. his claim is most true, I think, when you’re talking about how people ignore unhoused people as they walk past them: it can be painful to truly empathize with someone sleeping on the sidewalk you’re walking down after going to a movie and paying $9 for popcorn. it’s uncomfortable to fully see their humanity, to see yourself in them. it’s a lot easier to act like they don’t exist. personally, I see this as a form of repression, which is a temporary and imperfect way to manage emotion. it’s gonna come back some day, or at least stay somewhere in you. but in general, avoiding eye contact and acting like other people aren’t there is simply a courtesy. when you’re in a place with no real personal space to speak of, you have to create privacy by mutually, wordlessly agreeing to act like you’re not perceiving the people around you. it’s kind of a beautiful thing, because it allows you to be in the midst of “excessive human contact” while still maintaining a sense of privacy and comfort. when I was younger, being in new york really activated my social anxiety, because there are just so many people to perceive you. but now that I know it better, I know that there’s almost nowhere on earth where you’re /less/ likely to be noticed and judged for doing something weird.