It’s Not About the Money, Money, Money…

From harsh moral questioning to in-depth economic lectures. Same old…

Every semester, with each on-campus concert or event, the highly active Rate AUC Professors group on Facebook is bombarded with debate.

To voice their concerns, offer help, or ask about student-related issues, the Rate AUC Professors page has become the go-to platform for the AUC community.

This time, it’s to debate the ethics of reselling concert tickets at more than triple the original price.

On November 9, the Developers student club is hosting a concert for Egyptian megastars Tamer Hosny and Mahmoud El Essily.

Tickets were sold out last Monday, and hence people started asking for extra tickets on the Rate AUC Professors page.

As usual, students with the extra tickets decide to sell at what I’d rather call fairy tale prices.

The original ticket price was for about EGP 375. Students, almost a week before the event, are selling them for around EGP 800 to EGP 1000 in the name of ‘business’.

I’m not really intending to resume their debate here, but their justifications and normalization of the issue honestly amazes me.

For them, it’s the simple supply and demand principle of economics. Tickets sold out, I have limited products, a lot of people are willing to pay, the highest bidder gets it. End of story.

Except that, you’re not a business project. I understand supply and demand if Developers themselves were the ones selling them. They actually worked on the fundraising event, they paid for the singers, and they paid the taxes.

You, in turn, did none of that. And yet, you think it’s fair for you to create your own black market and get triple the profit on a silver platter.

But that’s not even my point. What fascinates me is how we have become unconsciously caught up in our capitalist system that everything is just about money and business.

It’s not the first time for me to realize how some students jump on to each and every opportunity to make profit out of non-profit situations.

If they get you an HR training for your group for example, they would add a fraction of the training’s fees to themselves, just for the call they made.

And I’m not at all judging. Everyone’s entitled to do what they see fit.

I’m only concerned with where these mathematically calculated relationships are taking us.

Belittling humans to just money-making machines has always been problematic. It’s really just a never-ending loop of exploitation.

Exploiting resources, humans, the environment, relationships, and who knows what else. And even then, it will never be enough. You’ll keep on wanting more and more and more.

To make it worse, we cannot really blame anyone for this. It’s just the nature of the system that makes societies respect only the wealthy, turning us all into rats running in a wheel. Overworked and never satisfied.

The rat race beckons.