We stand at a time where we are collectively bearing witness to the abuses of power around us. What if our response to this abuse was to take action, by becoming architects of the new world? Through these actions, you have the power to shape a world where social empowerment is the priority in designing a just society.
Your acts of architecture in this new world are yours to define. If you see pricing and value as a place of reform, paying what it’s worth may be part of your new world portfolio. Paying what it’s worth is a socially empowered method of valuing goods and services. The buyer pays what they feel the product is worth, based upon the value they receive, and the seller receives a fair price for the value they provide. Through the simple act of creating a non-zero-sum scenario in your economic exchanges, you are creating collective social action in support of a sustainable, regenerative economy.
If you imagine a different kind of market society and a different way of valuing the world, understand you have the opportunity to create it. You have the power and ability to create your own economy and your own system for doing business. The type of economy and market you inhabit, as a customer and as a business, is yours to define and to choose. You have a choice in whom you do business with and how.
If we’d like for others to stop abusing their power, we first need to work on how we abuse ours. The current economic system is not working, and it supports us in abusing the value and costs of creation. It supports us in getting things cheap—at less than their worth—without an eye to the true costs of doing so. These true costs come in many forms, and their price is always paid, in one way or another. This universal truth is one we’ve been trying to outrun for too long.
The ultimate misuse of our power is in giving it away by not paying attention to the price tags of our actions, and their future implications. Isn’t it time we stop and take stock of all the costs we ignore? Of all that weighs us down?
Let’s architect together a new world where we pay attention to the price tags of our actions. For when we account for the cost of all our actions, economic and otherwise, we empower ourselves—and others—to do the same.
