After a fairly long-read, we are here to conclude dear reader. Following are the takeaways and keepsakes.
Loving, dating and marriage are exchange and therefore market systems. In market or currency systems, the buyer, whoever she is, wants to pay the least price for the most value. In contrast, the seller, whoever she is, wants to extract the most premium for the least values.
That, falling in love and marriages are trades, is nothing exotic. Any community, even of two, is an exchange system and is therefore a currency or trading system. And the matter is accented by the fact of falling in love and marriage being fairly scarce commodities. Therefore, there is on each side a stated or subliminal demand that the most be made of each engagement or exchanged value.
Anytime two or more different peoples are gathered, to sustain their unions, they must indulge in exchange or market mechanisms. This is because only market systems make interactions and negotiations positive-sum games and thus sustainable. Simply put, only market mechanisms create and sustain the most wealth. But are there really other systems?
Even more, trading doesn’t exclude love. One can love the trade or assets on offer or that he or she is transacting for. For instance, we are bidding for “Enweonwu at Work,” a masterpiece by Sunmi Smart-Cole. And we love it no less than Smart-Cole who created the picture. And even as the price separates us and the masterpiece, we are still in love with it. Markets need not vitiate or annul love.
Exchanges or markets work, as perhaps no other systems, because of an implied Adam Smith-style logic, or is it magic? Free markets are systems, whereby a party in selling at the greatest list price thinks he is making a killing. Meanwhile, the buyer in buying at the same list price believes he is made a bargain. Therefore, it is not the paying or the amount that should trouble the men, but whether in paying they are convinced they are getting premium value. And vice versa for the women. It is just an exchange system, a game.
Now, evolution has replaced the old currency of muscles with new ones, the currency of money. However, the evolution of men’s choices in women have not really been remarkable, if it happened at all. Fact is, the modern man still salivates for the vulnerable and fragile consorts, the nwatas, the kideges. But that is as the currency of trade has evolved radically, from muscle to the cash nexus.
The matter now gets interesting. It is a far as we know, the men who for thousands of years were [and have been?] the dominant species. That is the cultural universe as is, is as designed, inaugurated and run, largely by the men. It is the men that first fronted muscles as the currency of exchange. The women, then outgunned, queued in, perhaps in a resentful truce.
As alpha evolutionary agents, it is also the men who pushed for the change from muscle through barter to money currencies. Of course, the men also used the currencies of muscles, barter and money etc. to rank themselves. Thus, being alive for the men was like a super-league game, Seria A and all that jazz.
Importantly, the men who demand for fragility, for nwatas, in women, cannot next ask of the same women not to negotiate for protection from the men. And protection in modern speak is a matter of cash, not humor. In other words, it is the men who really asked that their consorts hanker after the money connection. Or do the men want the fragile, the nwatas, to hanker after more vulnerabilities? The women already have that in excess and are in the export market for it.
In other words, in the league play the men fixed for the universe, they asked that the women become fans. And fans are fickle, are emotion tossed. They did reflexively opt out of their losing team to support the winner sides. In fact, the very idea of fandom is to be cheerleaders, consorts, to the winning sides; to be groupies to Messi, to Okocha. Fans are not there to help humor loser sides.
One closeted truth is this. Not too many men, rich or poor, have the balls to mount a richer woman. And the fact of this has to be understood. It is not the fault of the men or nurture. It is the fault of nature, or nature as fixed by men. And the fact of this fixture has enjoyed so long a reign of impunity it is a force of nature.
Through history up to present day, fact remains that the men want to be called to give tender care, and not just companionship to their princesses. By being independently powerful, the women excise and annul the need for this tenderness from the care. That leaves the men as praetorian guards, drones, possibly on hire or self-volunteering? Or even as mere donors, donors of commoditised semen. Yet being a man has been for thousands of years being a lord, at least in marriage. Igbo betray the fact of this by styling a husband, di, – master [of his women]. And now, he is to be made a mere peer? Boy, things happen.
Here is the twist in the tale. As evolution happened, opportunities for women opened up as never before. Today women are in high and mighty offices and even own banks. All these amount to the acquisition of muscle for the women in issue. And the fact of this should be important to the modern woman.
In other words, a woman who is rich and or in high office, even if she is as tiny as a grain of sand with her protoplasm, is never mind, a sheppopotamus. In other words, these [high office] sheppotamuses, for example, the female senators, deputy governors, etc. are not needing any external [male or even divine] covers or protection anymore. On their own they can procure such protections. And are flaunting it.
Thus, a vital arm of a man falling in love with such sheppotamuses is irrecoverably lost. All that may remain are his lusts, his private but undeclared humor. In other words, all sheppopotamuses are by the logic of the fact, lovelorn. And the veracity of this will subsist till we challenge or change the ecology of the [market] forces at work, and not the men and women at play. Ahiazuwa.
Other matters
Currency is not the only track or measure of negotiation. It is only the dominant one. There are of course women who go for whatnot, not excluding sympathy, in choosing their men. But values like sympathy are like scrip notes – they have restricted not currency-wide use and don’t point to the general trend. Ecology of nature or love has its mutations.
There is an implied issue of biology or evolution as markets. Yes, it is. It is a long tale but suffice to state as follows: “Darwin’s view was simpler and more ruthless. To him, evolution had no commonwealth; self-interest is what matters. He was right. There is not charity in Nature.” Almost like a whale/The Origins of Species Updated by Steve Jones a British geneticist.
If there is no charity in nature, it is even more so in economics. In fact, from division of labor, to export led prosperity, etc., all these economic and analytic tools were learnt or poached off nature, by Adam Smith and followers. Perhaps they did it reflexively, perhaps studiedly.
Finally, that the women prefer the men with more money is the dosage the Surgeon General would have prescribed. It is all in keeping with the age old wisdom: In life, you don’t get what you deserve, in life, you get what you negotiate. Men negotiated a league system of ranking based on muscles and its evolutionary progenies – barter, monies etc. Men must live happily with the consequences of their choices or go extinct. Of course the extinction of the men may make the women more blessed for it. Evolution may next drive them to be whole in themselves – as hermaphrodites. And all the riches and abundances of world as we know it, will be theirs and theirs alone.
And this concludes our take on the Women-Money-Evolution nexus, thanks to the generous hospitality of The Lion House, Magodo, GRA, Lagos. Ahiazuwa.