Bad Bargains

Feb 19

Written By Magda

In the folktale “The Handless Maiden,” a miller is walking through the forest and meets a strange old man who promises him riches and a life of ease in exchange for what is behind his mill. The miller pictures the old apple tree he knows is back there, and agrees. He is instantly bedecked in jewels. The stranger promises to collect what is his in a year and the miller heads home to find his wife covered in finery and his house a castle. His astonished wife asks him how this has happened and the miller excitedly recounts the tale of the old man in the forest, the bargain, the jewels. His wife stops him. “Wait, husband, wait,” she says. “What exactly did he say he wanted in return for all this?” When he tells her, she falls to the earth sobbing. “Oh my husband, our daughter has been out sweeping behind the mill all morning. It most surely was the devil you met and he has traded you for our daughter.”

As the tale unfolds, the devil comes for the daughter three times but because of her purity is unable to take her. In the course of the negotiations he persuades the miller to chop off his daughter’s hands. Finally the devil gives up. The miller and his wife implore their daughter to stay and be taken care of with all the riches they now have, but the daughter declines. She bandages the bloody stumps where her hands used to be and she heads out into the forest alone.

This was a bad bargain.

Of course, once we know the story’s ending, we can see its folly and none would take this deal. But the catch is that the devil doesn’t reveal himself as the devil. In the Brothers Grimm tale, he is just “an old man.” As Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells it, he is “a strange man wearing a little green jacket.”

And he doesn’t name his price up front, he talks in circles. He only wants “what stands behind the mill.” The miller thinks for a minute, pictures the space behind the mill, and only remembers an old apple tree. He doesn’t go look. He doesn’t ask the strange man to state his terms explicitly. He makes an assumption that this strange little man wants to trade riches for old trees and he agrees, and so seals his daughters’ fate.

Now consider these bargains that, on a personal level, most of us are making every day:

Your credit card company promises that you can have that new TV set now even though you don’t have the money.
Amazon will bring you your widget at 30% cheaper than the mom and pop store down the street.
Your smartphone promises greater efficiency, accessibility, more connection to your loved ones.

Most of us have a sense that these are probably at least questionable bargains.

Credit Card Bargains

For example, we know that credit card contracts contain hidden costs like:

Interest rates that will increase exponentially once the promotion period is over
Late fees, hidden fees, annual fees,
Changes in the fine print down the road
The impact on our credit score depending how we use the card, and if we cancel it

But we are less aware of the more deeply hidden costs to the bargain:

The shop owner pays the credit card company fees and then must increase their prices to cover them
The credit card uses these fees and your interest to support global events that eventually harm you (e.g. making weapons or fracking for oil)
Long term acceptance of this bargain makes the use of credit cards so endemic to American culture that it becomes increasingly difficult to live without one

These more distal costs are like the daughter behind the mill.

Amazon Bargains

Similarly, Amazon promises that its lower prices are due to centralized warehouses and more efficient shipping. But hidden costs to the model are made invisible, for example:

Adding emissions and plastic waste to the environment
Pushing small businesses out of the market
Feeding the expansion of a 400 billion dollar conglomerate who uses that financial power to support global events that harm you (see above)
Donating your data to systems designed to manipulate human potential for private gain

Not to mention one of the most profoundly invisible bad bargains of all: The fact that the trillion dollar American conglomerate has stolen (bargained for and won?) the name recognition of the world’s most diverse endangered ecosystem.

Electronic Device Bargains

To expand the lens a little, most of us are consciously aware of some of the negative consequences of our electronic device use but it can be so hard to remember, while deep in the hypnotic thrall of our screens, what we are missing out on. Things like:

Looking at or being in actual 3D nature - the smell of trees, the curve of sunlight, the rising moon, the shape of shadows
Making eye contact with your neighbors as you pass on the street
The analog experience of making a phone call and then talking to someone on the phone
Interacting in person, in real time with loved ones

There are profound short and long term consequences to trading slow, thoughtful, three dimensional interaction for fast, unconscious, two dimensional ones. But we don’t even know all the ways this shapes our brains, our bodies, our communities. The long term consequences of all of the above, again, the daughter behind the mill. In the name of progress, we make the bargain, but there actually is no way to fully comprehend what we sacrifice.

Once you understand the concept of bad bargains, you will start to see them everywhere. And this should come as no surprise because truly bad bargains are baked in to the core tenets of American overculture.

America’s Conceptual Bad Bargains: perpetual growth, eternal youth, separation from nature, splitting

Consider capitalism and its reliance on perpetual growth. This is, in essence, a denial that time exists. The beauty, diet, and anti-aging industries (not to mention the sports car and strip club industries) would have you believe that if you play by their rules then you can live forever, stay young forever. And not just you individually, but America. It posits that if Americans keep buying then the economy will be forever expanding and there will never be retraction. There will never be collapse.

But the hidden costs of the illusion of eternal youth include not just the 40+ hours a week of work to make the money to buy the (fill in the blank: beauty, diet, anti-aging product, sports car) but also the cumulative toll that that work takes on our relationships, our bodies, and our mental health, and the associated opportunity costs. Most of us are now at least somewhat aware that when it comes to the constellation of work, stress, sleep, mental health, social connection, and access to healthcare, Americans have a significantly poorer profile than other Western nations. Like the miller, we may get the illusion of comfort, but we give up our life force, our true vitality (the miller’s daughter) and the ability of that vital life force to connect to the world, to engage, to authentically make (as symbolized by the daughter’s hands).

This bargain is particularly insidious because it cannot ever deliver. At least the miller gets the gold - Americans just get the illusion of immortality and eternal youth. The overculture cannot keep its end of this bargain because everything ages - it is part of our inherent contract with this planet. Not much is guaranteed about life on this planet but aging and death certainly are.

In the natural world, of which we are a part, everything is cyclical. The earth’s turn, the movement of the earth around the sun, and therefore the light and dark of each day, the seasons of summer and winter. These cycles teach us that everything changes, everything dies, and everything becomes compost and returns to new life in another form. In order to deny the autumn and winter, the decrease, the death, we must split off part of our nature.

This is one of the greatest unseen costs of the bad bargain of perpetual youth: the splitting, the way that we turn against ourselves. We critique our bodies, our habits, each other. We divide and judge, vying to be the richest, the skinniest, the fairest of them all instead of actually living. We become half a person turned against the other half of ourselves rather than a whole person loving ourselves and living our lives. Collectively we become factions of a species divided against each other and against the natural world rather than an abundant ecosystem full of diverse variations and creative expressions, observing and appreciating each other.

This splitting inside ourselves, between individuals, between groups of people, and between the United States and other countries supports and is supported by the tenet of American individualism Since our inception, American overculture has touted the maxim of individual independence, of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. And yet, the last half century of science has continually reified what indigenous people have known all along - that everything is connected. We know from studying mycelium, ecosystems, forest communities, and our own digestive and nervous systems that no organisms exist independently of other organisms - we are intimately interconnected all the time. Science currently estimates that our bodies host 10,000+ organisms in any given moment, not to mention that more than half of every breath we take was exhaled by some member of the plant kingdom. As philosopher Bayo Akomolafe explains, it is preposterous to imagine that we have a discrete self to even point to - for where would you say it begins or ends.

By perpetuating the myth of separation, American overculture severs us from the truth of how space actually works. When we are lost in the illusion of separation, we deny our inherent relationships and all the reciprocal gifts that are available to us. And so we cut ourselves off from our loved ones in seen and unseen ways, we do not protect the other living beings on this planet, we silo ourselves in our homes with our devices and succumb to what U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy called an “epidemic of loneliness.” Although I imagine there was a time when this looked like a sweet deal, at this point in the evolution of our species it is hard to imagine how this could be a good bargain.

Widening the Lens: America’s Historical Bad Bargains

The scope of bad bargains takes a truly sinister turn when we widen the historical lens. Because America’s “success” rests upon the spoils of two of the worst bargains ever struck: the genocide of the native people of Turtle Island and colonialization of their homelands, and the import of humans from Africa and their enslavement for 250 years. These bargains built American wealth for some and cost our country her soul.

Just a few of the hidden costs of these bargains include:

Loss of a shared sense of humanity with other human beings

The creation of whiteness (including the loss of individual European cultural histories, languages, traditions, sense of place, and all the compensatory activities created to offset this - more bad bargains)

Loss of connection to land and nature

An infrastructure that continues to be dependent upon the success of a few at the expense of many, and all the intrapsychic defenses it takes to maintain it.

When I take the concept out this far, I start to feel a little like my head is going to explode. The truth is that many pages could be written on each of these points and I hope to address them in greater detail in future articles, but to stay focused on the bargain part, I leave them as bullet points here.

I believe that we are currently seeing the consequences of these deep fissures in the bedrock of our culture taken to their inevitable extreme. This is why it feels like we are living in the final chapter of a dystopian novel.

So with bad bargains being offered at every street corner, how do we protect ourselves and our loved ones? How do we protect our children and our apple trees? With bad bargains baked into our core belief systems, how do we start to dismantle the ideology that can only offer bad bargains, and start to make something new? What can we do to resist the gravitational pull of the old patterns long enough to see where we can make real change? I believe we start small, with practice.

A Few Suggestions:

Learn to make slightly better bargains

We must recognize that there are no 100% good bargains. In fact, the very act of seeking them is an enactment of principle #2 - separation: it presumes that there are good bargains and bad ones and we can learn to discern and then be redeemed (I recognize that my wording throughout this article has contributed to this dualism - a not 100% good bargain, but I made it because I determined the clarity was worth it this time). Rather than perfection, we must seek to become more and more aware of the balance of goodness and badness of the bargains we are making, and identify small or large ways we can improve our bargains.

Slow down

Whenever and however you can, slow down - remind your body that time exists. If you can meditate, meditate - there is no better way to return to time than to actually sit in it.

Embrace endings and death. Grieve small things so that you are more prepared to grieve big things. There are meditations that practice the end of each breath being a death. Say a few small words for a houseplant that surrenders to the cycle of life. I spent a summer living quite close to nature and when a baby deer was hit by a car near my house, I had the urge to take my daily runs in the other direction. But I made a practice of running by on the other side of the road, then on the same side of the road, then looking at the animal’s decaying body with love and compassion. It took time but it was a practice in accepting death that has supported me through many losses since.

Learn to Feel

Robert Johnson focuses his entire analysis of the Handless Maiden story on the devaluation of the feeling function in Western culture. Being able to feel our feelings enables us to tolerate truth - our own, others’ and the truth of our world. It also helps us connect authentically with others. Because feeling has been devalued for so long in Western culture, many of us do not know what to do with feelings. We shut them down because we are overwhelmed. But our tolerance for feeling can be built like a muscle. In this case we must start small and practice. Simply pausing to name emotions can be a start. There are excellent charts available offering guidance for identifying feelings. It is also a good idea to limit, as best we can, the amount of dysregulation we encounter in any given day. A media diet or managing intake can often do wonders to help manage this overwhelm.

Learn to be kind

Kindness can be a kind of vulnerability. Often we protect ourselves with indifference or judgement. But we must learn to be kind - to ourselves and others. This is a prerequisite for healing the deep splitting we have been taught to do. We can start by noticing. Observe your judging self, when it turns on you and when it turns on others. The excellent work on self-compassion by Kristin Neff and Tara Brach can be a resource here. Our inner critics exist to keep us in compliance with a world that splits us. Wholeness is the only cure. Refusing to compete is highly subversive. Make a practice of getting to know your neighbors. Be the one to initiate eye contact or say hello. Build community. Share.

Be the one that starts the new story. If the miller already felt like he had enough time/gold/food/connection with others and that his neighbors would support him and his family if there was catastrophe, this story might have a totally different trajectory. The story only holds up in a world that believes in scarcity of vital life force, connection, and resources. It might be too much to imagine building that totally different world right now, but I do believe we can take small steps in that direction.

The Handless Maiden and the Angel (illustration by Robert François Richard Brend'amour, 19th century)

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Primary sources cited:

Estés, C. P. (1992). Women who run with the wolves: myths and stories of the wild woman archetype. First edition. New York, Ballantine Books.

Johnson, R. A. (1995). The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden: Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology. New York, HarperOne.

Meditation and Self-Compassion Resources:

Tara Brach https://www.tarabrach.com/talks-audio-video/

Kristin Neff https://self-compassion.org/self-compassion-practices/

Feel your Feelings Resources:

Feelings wheel

https://feelingswheel.com/

(there are heaps of these - just google feelings wheel and pick one at the level of complication or simplicity you prefer)

Grief

https://www.francisweller.net/

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

There are a number of online resources, groups, and books on Emotion Regulation.

One book to get started: The Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills Workbook by McKay, Wood, and Brantley (2019)