Venus & the Myth of Value

or: why Chappell Roan doesn't owe you shit

Where does value come from? How do we truly know what something is worth? What causes the value of something to change? Can value be assigned to anything, including a human life?

These are all Venusian questions.

Venus, commonly reduced in pop astrology to the embodiment of beauty, connection, and pleasure, also reveals the inherent volatility and subjectivity of worth through her history of representing various goddesses of war and justice. In both mythological and modern contexts, Venus disrupts the capitalist notion of “stable value” by highlighting how what we cherish is as easily discarded as it is celebrated—and we can see this clearly in the treatment of celebrities in our current epoch, particularly women. The capitalist myth of value—a belief that the worth of any thing can be measured and quantified based on a number of known factors—collapses under Venus’ influence, where value is shown to be fluid, relational, and subject to the whims of desire and discord.

Understanding the Polarity: Socially Constructed Value vs. Fixed Capitalist Value

Fixed capitalist value emphasizes the idea that everything can be commodified—bought and sold—but in order to commodify something, it needs to have a value (price) attached to it. This results in the myth that the value of all things is quantifiable and can be measured, standardized, and expressed numerically. Capitalism seeks to create a sense of stability and predict the future by assigning fixed value metrics that suggest worth is inherent and enduring, reinforcing the notion that markets can objectively determine value, instead of relationships or social perceptions or historical context. This type of value is often constructed by those who hold social, economic, or cultural power—and it does spill over into the way value is placed on individual human lives.

“What is an economy? You might say it is how people who cannot predict the future deal with it.”

Derek Thompson