Value

Value must be assigned. It cannot be achieved unilaterally. It is not within the scope of individual action. So whereas merit can be cultivated and accrued, value must be assigned. We do not live in a merit-based society and the value assigned is not likely to be always equal to the worth of the true merit. Worth is a puzzling issue. Worth from whose perspective? How is the worth to be ascertained?

Individuals have to be honest and forthcoming. They have to learn to place themselves in a system and derive their worth. But in such an honest ecosystem, why would individuals not cheat? Why wold they not inflate their self-worth and pitch themselves higher than they are actually are located at?

As opposed to the peer-validation of the idea of self-worth and the assignment of value that is conventionally used, we want to propose a performative honesty. That means that if a person can convey a particular feeling to another person and if the other person attests to the fact that the feeling was conveyed then the worth of the performer would be certified. We are only searching for actors who can act and not the value of their act. We want to look at the capacity and not the content. The capacity is in this sense the format of the act. And the format is the only that we can form an objective relationship with. It is the register that does not shift.

When we are able to arrive at a standard notion of worth, we still need to arrive at the concept of value and the method through which it is arrived at.

Let’s return to our original claim that value needs to be assigned. We will go further now and say that value needs to be assigned by the user. If this is not the case, then it can be a random assignment. But who is defined as the user? And if we are taking about users, we will need to distinguish between primary and secondary users. The primary user of an entity is the one that defines its reason and right to exist. The secondary user is the one that is only accessing the entity in a recreational way. We distinguish between these two users but we want considerations extended from both these kinds of users. We want to know the function of an entity as well as its recreational value. If something is not much fun then what good is it?

Fun is the lowest level of meaning that we can make from a situation. Inspite of performance, inspiration, challenging, obscuring etc. we still need fun from whatever body of content we deal with. What does fun mean? There need to be no bubbles and no froth involved, but anything that is not vexing in nature can be considered fun. Being vexed drains us and we don’t care about the worth of an entity but we will not assign any value if we are vexed by it.