What’s the deal?

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Among other characteristics Donald Trump is known as a deal-maker. Perhaps this is what his supporters see in him but do not see it in mainstream hacks such as Hillary Clinton. Deal-makers do deals while the political class prefers one-sided iceberg type arrangements where most of the weighty stuff is out of sight below the waterline.

Perhaps Trump’s supporters were attracted to his reputation as a deal-maker simply because of this perception, a sense that deals are the stuff of social and political life. A sense that political deals matter in a democracy so they should be out in open, not hidden away behind closed doors where all the caveats and dishonesty lurk.

In this sense life itself could be described as an infinite mesh of deals. Big deals, small deals, family deals, down the pub deals, professional deals, social and political deals. Deals are everywhere, they pervade everything we do.

At a basic level a deal can be as automatic as stimulus and response, but what is the best response? What is the deal and is there a better deal, a smarter response? Much deal-making is likely to be subconscious because we learn about deals as we grow up, particularly through rewards and punishments. Rewards are good deals, punishments are bad deals – we all know that. We absorb the deal-making message and we absorb it early.

Even if nobody ever explicitly explains what deals are and how universal they are, we still grow up knowing exactly what they are. As adulthood looms the deals become complex, covert and ambiguous but they are still deals, still essentially the same as they were during our early years.

In these terms human progress has been a long and protracted attempt to forge better deals, both individually and collectively. The written word, books, newspapers, travel and wider horizons all seem to have expanded our ability to understand the deals we make voluntarily and the deals we are forced to make in order to navigate our way through life. Over recent centuries ordinary people have slowly learned to expect more socially efficient deals, more economically efficient deals, usually in the teeth of implacable resistance from those who always benefitted from one-sided deals and incidentally from inefficient deals. The rich and powerful are the obvious one-sided deal-makers. The entire political class is another, whatever their pretensions.

Human progress seems to be a painfully slow recognition of these one-sided deals, a recognition that more equitable political and social deals are generally better for everyone. Even elites eventually understand why life has to be more even-handed. More equitable deals reduce social tensions, crime and the threat of violence. Economies grow. Government is more effective and secure until it forgets that even its deals must evolve.

Yet there is still a long way to go and the one-sided deal still has money and power rooting for it. Now we have those complex deals we are busy forging with the online world, particularly with the media giants. What kind of deals are we forging with Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and co?

More traditionally, we encounter social deals all the time but do not generally recognise them as deals.

Speak as we speak, behave as we behave and we’ll accept you as one of us. That’s the deal.

Align yourself with our virtues and you too are virtuous. That’s the deal.

Style your hair as we do, wear the clothes we wear and you are one of us. That’s the deal.

Laugh when we laugh and you are one of us. That’s the deal.

Build to this specification and your building will be accepted. That’s the deal.

Design your experiment to support our paradigm and we support you. That’s the deal.

Feed me, keep me warm and I may climb on your lap and purr. That’s the feline deal.

Even this blog post is a deal. If I say enough to attract a comment or two then that makes it more worthwhile even if the comments offer other perspectives. Otherwise I won’t get comments and that’s less satisfactory but that’s the blogger’s deal. There are a number of others.

Voting in elections is generally one-sided deal. Voters receive very little from their trip to the polling station. It should come as no surprise when we occasionally try to make the voting deal less one-sided. Unfortunately we aren’t very good at it because the overall political deal is heavily skewed against us even though we supposedly live in a democracy. The outcome of the voters’ deal is so feeble, diffuse and protracted that it isn’t at all easy to tell the difference between a bad deal and an even worse deal. Not a satisfactory situation.

If one looks at the world in this way then certain clarifications emerge. Good deals ought to require knowledge and insight but we are seduced by our emotional sensitivity to the mores of the times, by our willingness to strike a lifestyle deal with those mores. Personal philosophies are skewed by the social and political deals we make. Deals with the establishment, deals with, the status quo or deals with reality. The first two are easy, the third not so easy.

Yet there is a curious satisfaction in not making deals, especially certain mainstream social and political deals. No deal may be better than a bad deal and therein lies a core problem of modern times. There is a definite trend towards forced deals, towards a level of political and social correctness which is already damaging the dynamism of deal-making and our ability to spin new deals from the inadequacies of older deals.

Deal-making in this sense is the stuff of progress, Stifle it and we go backwards. Eventually the ultimate hard-nosed deal-maker takes a hand, That deal-maker is reality.