Co-Opting Our Values

Many of us are aware of how our business values can get co-opted by the values and structures of capitalism. What may be less obvious is how our personal values can also be influenced by capitalist thinking.

Capitalism is more than an economic system. Capitalism is a fundamental part of our politics, culture, and how we understand and navigate power structures. And it influences how we navigate our personal and professional lives, from how we set goals and think about achievement, to how we calculate our self-worth through dollars and cents.

Tara McMullin joins Erica to discuss the far-reaching impacts of capitalism on our lives, the gamification of our values and goals, how our values get co-opted by imperatives for efficiency and productivity, and how we can begin to cultivate awareness and make choices that truly align with our values.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

• Why capitalism is more than an economic system

• How the gamification of our lives keeps us striving for more “points”

• How capitalism creates the lens we use to shape our values

• How the system impacts how we view ourselves and our work

• How to build awareness and begin deconstructing the narratives of the system in your life

Navigating the Economy with Humanity

Tara McMullin is a writer, podcaster, and producer. For over 13 years, she’s studied small business owners—how they live, how they work, what influences them, and what they hope for the future. She’s the host of What Works, a podcast about navigating the 21st-century economy with your humanity intact. Tara is also co-founder of YellowHouse.Media, a boutique podcast production company. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, The Startup, The Muse, and The Huffington Post. Her first book, What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting, will be released in November 2022.

Capitalism Influences Everything

On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Tara McMullin (she/her) says that she has personally been in a process of deconstructing how she structures her work and her life in terms of her goals and definitions of achievement and success.

She says she realized that the compulsion to constantly be achieving more and more wasn’t serving her life, but it took additional time and introspection to uncover the roots of that compulsion in the systemic influence of capitalist thinking and ideology.

“The system all around me is telling me that that’s what smart, successful people with lots of potential do, is we climb these ladders, we get higher and higher up in society…those ladders were informed by the values of capitalism and the system of capitalism.”

She says it’s important to bear in mind that capitalism is not just an economic system, but it is a political and cultural system that impacts structures of power throughout our society.

It may sound bleak to think of capitalism as a force that influences everything we do, but she says having awareness and consciousness of those forces allows us to begin to make different choices.

Gaming Our Values

As Tara moved through her personal deconstruction and reshaping the way she plans her life, work, and goals, she was also working on her book What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting.

During her research, she was introduced to the work of philosopher C. Thi Nguyen and his work on game theory and gamification. She says his work provides a lens for thinking about how our personal values can be co-opted by capitalism.

The brief definition of a game is an artificial environment with a set of clear rules, a clear objective, and a clear points system or method of determining what is good or bad behavior within the game. As humans, Tara says, we enjoy being in spaces with these kinds of very clear definitions and expectations, because real life exists in so many gray areas.

Nguyen’s work posits that games have come to structure much of our real lives, particularly in the context of neoliberal financialized capitalism. Tara says that in capitalism, the points system rewards us with more dollars, stuff, accolades, etc. and teaches us that we should want those rewards and take action toward them.

“As a worker, we know what all those shoulds are because we were born into them. And so we end up taking action that gets us more points so that we can get further in the game. The problem, of course, is that those points don’t necessarily reflect our values, and very often are in opposition to our values.”

Nguyen calls this process of taking a complex set of metrics and distilling it down to a simplistic equation value capture.

Tara says, “I call it values hijacking because it’s not simply that this complex set of values is reduced to a simple equation, it’s that our very values end up being recast in the system in order to furthering the ends of capitalism, as opposed to furthering our ends as humans.”

Erica adds that within this system, our self-worth also by default gets tangled in with our material worth.

Tara agrees and says that within capitalism, “literally everything is recast through market forces and valuation and the profit motive. So the only way we can understand worth, understand value, understand exchange, is through these simplified metrics. So dollars and cents and profit, essentially.”

Recasting Values Through the Capitalist Lens

While there are very concrete, direct ways in which money impacts our lives, money is also a shared delusion that can be very malleable.

Erica says that understanding that money isn’t “real” can be a scary rabbit hole to go down. “There’s the real piece of it of, can I feed my family? And then it’s like, but I’m trying to feed them with something that doesn’t technically exist.”

She wonders if that dissonance plays a part in how capitalism not only puts our values in the backseat of our lives, but keeps them there.

Tara says it’s not just that our values are put in the backseat, it’s that they are actually recast through the lens of capitalism.

As an example, she talks about the trend of conscious consumption, where we connect what we buy with having positive impacts in the world, whether by buying products that are branded as more eco-friendly or more worker-friendly. Conscious consumption is fundamentally a marketing message that gives us permission to keep buying more stuff.

“This is a case where you can really see some very clear values, not just taking a backseat, but literally being co-opted for the ends of capitalism so that companies can profit, so that people buy more stuff, so that stock prices rise, so that people go into more debt.”

She continues, “Those are all things that benefit the powers that be within capitalism, and those are things that don’t benefit us the vast majority of the time. And it’s being told to us that this is how we exercise our values.”

Erica says we can also see these forces at play when we talk about labor and things like work-life balance. “These concepts are given to us to give us this hope that we have not, in a sense, wilfully abandoned our values in exchange for currency in the form of capitalism points.”

Industrial Imperatives

Erica says that we can’t discuss capitalism and our values without bringing up our culture’s emphasis on productivity, speed, immediate gratification, and efficiency and how those imperatives also cause us to act against our values.

Tara says that productivity and urgency disconnect us from our own awareness, and when we are disconnected, we’re less likely to second-guess the system.

These imperatives in our lives are direct descendants of industrialization, which was driven by productivity and efficiency as drivers of profitability.

Productivity and a desire for ease aren’t inherently bad, but she says, “when it is the totalizing force, when it’s how we understand what is valuable or what is worthy of power, that’s when it starts to get really screwy.”

She says reconnecting to our awareness requires us to slow down, to accept less efficiency, or even some things not happening at all, which doesn’t benefit the system, but which is necessary for us.

We have to do the work to reconnect with our awareness because our indoctrination into the system begins in our early childhood through the metrics in our educational systems, from kindergarten gold stars to preteens and teens thinking about what activities will benefit them on college applications.

“It is baked into, not just our daily lives, it’s baked into how we know ourselves.”

It shows up in how we judge ourselves and others based on our organizational skills, our speed with learning new things, our ability to be productive, and we assign moral qualities to these characteristics.

“When we are unaware of how those stories are playing out, we are going to make choices that are in favor of the system versus in favor of our own personal values or our own worldview, our own beliefs.”

And while there is no way to completely extract ourselves from the system, cultivating awareness allows us to make more choices that are in alignment with our values.

“It’s valuable to recognize that there’s a tradeoff there. So that when the opportunity comes to make a different choice in the future, you know that that’s available to you, as opposed to only being in touch with the shoulds and the supposed tos that the system has given.”

Class, Access, and Points

Erica says that in her life, one way that the values and moral judgments of characteristics have come up is in relationship to linear versus nonlinear thinking. She says that she is not a linear thinker, and that has often been described to her as an undesirable trait.

Tara says that is a trait that gets cast differently in different subsets of the economy, and is often related to class.

“If you’re thinking about who is working for wages and even some who work for salaries, linear thinking is a positive trait in that group. If we're looking at high level managers, executives, artists, designers, the creative economy piece, then the more iterative creative thinking is the highly valuable skill.”

So if you grow up in an environment where “doing the job the way you’re supposed to do the job” is the predominant value, then creative, iterative thinking will be cast as less desirable.

Tara says this divide is a good example of how supremacy culture is inherent to capitalism, with an in group and an out group that frames how we understand who is better than who, and how we judge our own and others’ places in that order.

Erica notes that the gamification and collection of “points” also plays out along class lines in terms of access to opportunities and resources and the traits that are valued.

For someone coming into the world with more points, taking time off from work or school and being a creative thinker are accessible and valued, but for someone without those points, they have to attempt to earn their way into those options by thinking linearly and working tirelessly.

“I think a lot of it really does boil down to whether or not you have accumulated enough or you are just within yourself…the type of person that you have access to that worth, regardless of anything else. And that’s not necessarily always an easy thing…to almost go into the backend and [say] I’m gonna change my points. I have enough points. You told me I didn’t, but I do.”

Understanding Our Values Through the System

Erica asks if, given the system we’re exposed to basically from birth, if our values ever really have a chance to take a primary role in how we exist and act in the world.

Tara responds that, “If you grew up in American culture, the likelihood is that America’s particular brand of capitalism and its particular value system is the underlying foundation of how you understand the rest of your values.”

As an example, she says that someone who enters school loving and valuing learning, will learn to equate valuing learning with valuing good grades and test scores and the behaviors required to achieve that. 

“It is possible, and in fact likely, that you can have identified a personal set of values that is unique and true and authentic to you. And that that personal, unique, authentic set of values is understood through the filter of capitalism.”

To truly understand what those values mean to you, and to make choices and take action in alignment with them, requires becoming aware of and unpacking the system. 

Erica agrees that “you have to be able to first even recognize that [the system] is there before you can begin to shift or to change anything.”

Layered Narratives

Erica says that in the context of the work she does through Pause on the Play®, she often reminds people that the object is not to continuously consume information, but to put what they learn into action and Imperfect Allyship®. The goal with that reminder is to encourage people to reject perfectionism.

But there is also a cultural narrative that learning for the sake of learning is a waste of time, that if you don’t monetize what you’re learning in some way, there is no point to it.

Tara says that narrative is an extension of the incentive structure that says that the best use of our time is to work, because work produces money, and anything outside of that incentive structure is wasteful or an extra that you have to somehow earn.

That narrative causes us to reject activities that don’t somehow benefit us in our paid or unpaid labor.

Tara explains that there is an adjacent narrative about the value of the reproductive labor of caretaking and homemaking within the capitalist system and how divisions of labor along gender lines have evolved since the 20th century and shape how we understand gender, relationships, family structures. She also notes that there are racial components to who does traditionally white collar work and who does lower-wage paid caregiving work.

“The modern phenomenon of men working outside the home and women doing the reproductive labor, that is a capitalist incentive structure, a capitalist value system.”

Erica adds that “there is a hierarchy to which of those types of labor is worth more. And what is like, ‘well, you don’t really get anything for because you’re just supposed to do that.’”

She says pulling these threads really illustrates how pervasive capitalist structures are in our lives.

But Tara says, “It is valuable to celebrate each layer that you pull back…All of the baby steps that we can take along the way when it comes to unpacking these things, deconstructing these things, I think is incredibly valuable for overall systemic and societal change.”

Deconstructing and Building Awareness

Tara says that one concrete way of examining the narratives and peeling back the layers of capitalism in our lives is to begin with the shoulds and supposed tos and how those narratives impact the choices that we make and the behaviors that we perform.

She recommends taking note of how and when those come up, whether in a journal or in your notes app, and breaking it down through a series of questions”

• Where does that should come from?

• What is the story behind it?

• What is the incentive structure that’s built into that story?

• What is the end goal and in whose best interest is that end goal?

• Why does that incentive structure exist?

When you’ve broken it down, you can then think about reframing the story with your personal values so that it either serves you, or you can do something differently.

She recalls a conversation with Mara Glatzel on What Works last year where Mara unpacked her thoughts on ambition and whether her personal ambition was a result of capitalist indoctrination. By deconstructing that narrative, Mara realized that her ambition was her own.

“But you do it because you want it. You don’t do it because the system is incentivizing you to do it. It’s not always about changing our minds about things, sometimes it’s just understanding better why that thing is important to you.”

And like many things, repetition of the process builds the metaphorical muscle and makes breaking down the narratives easier over time.

“It’s something that can be integrated into the way you think, but it starts by just literally doing the work.”

Erica says that in her own life, she is much more aware of questioning and deconstructing narratives and shoulds with her kids, but she isn’t as vigilant when it comes to herself.

But she notes, “The more that you are aware of, and are paying attention to, and documenting what you’re doing, the more you’re like, oh, I didn’t think that little thing counted. And I was doing it way more than what I thought I was.”

Tara also emphasizes that it is not our individual responsibility to fix or overthrow capitalism, and that individualism is, in itself, a capitalist incentive structure.

“It has to be a collective action. And one of the wonderful things about increasing your awareness around when your values are being hijacked by the system is that it is also an opportunity for solidarity.

And so when you see how your values are hijacked by the system, and you see how you are being used on behalf of capitalism and capitalist ends, you start to see how other people are as well. And you start to have more empathy and more understanding for people in all sorts of different situations who are also being used. And that helps us come together to make real change.

But it’s not something any one of us can do. It is not all on your shoulders or my shoulders. We all have a part to play, but it requires collective action and solidarity to get it.”

Ready to Dive Deeper?

We all have things we think we “should” be doing, and those influences can get in the way of acting in alignment with our values, especially when we aren’t sure how to take our values from static words to actions.

Taking action with your values allows them to become guiding principles on how to respond, make choices, and create impact in your life and with your brand.

Members of Pause on the Play® The Community have evergreen access Erica and India’s Jackson’s workshop, Reconsidering What You Know About Values, where you’ll find support in understanding how leading with your values can shift your brand and your life.

Get access to the workshop and our entire library of evergreen resources by joining at pauseontheplay.com/community

Connect with Tara McMullin:

• What Works

• Instagram: @tara_mcmullin

• Twitter: @taragentile

• Preorder What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting