I ended the last post with a statement from Daniel Quinn concluding that the path forward is to recondition ourselves to simply begin anew and stop relying on old failed paradigms to somehow work out solutions for us.
When I cover alternative economic paradigms, I am often asked why I feel that they could possibly succeed over the present paradigm. Well, it isn’t about trying to fix the current system within the current system. That’s Old Minds with new programs that always end up just exacerbating the problems. It’s about creating a new system that works from what makes sense to everyone. After the 2008 debacle, a lot of people realized just how flawed the current economic system really is, but they didn’t see any other option but to carry on trying to fix what we all know is a broken system. This is changing as people start to hear about and see other alternate economic ideas coming into the picture. Ideas that were once on the fringes of economic theory are now starting to move to center stage as recognition of the next probable economic meltdown is occurring, and the blatant failures of the unhealthy free-market system become obvious.
In a competitive system, more for you means less for me, so greed and hoarding become the norm. In a collaborative system, more for you means more for me, because sharing becomes the norm. Competition emphasizes distrust and fear, while collaboration emphasizes trust and caring. For a long time, biologists believed that nature was a vast competitive system where the law of the jungle ruled. However, it is now recognized that nature is actually one vast collaborative system, where inter- and intraspecies cooperation is more the norm. I’m not saying that competitive exclusion doesn’t happen, but the well-being of the various natural ecosystems is dependent on the well-being of all of the parts. Species that overrun (monopolize) a local system, inevitably end up ruining that system. Aldo Leopold emphasizes that idea beautifully in his story ‘The Mountain’ where the elimination of wolves in New Mexico did not benefit the hunters with more deer, but that the deer population, now unchecked by wolves, exploded and the deer ate all the available vegetation and starved.
Around the Holidays in the U.S., there are always a batch of popular films shown because they hold a message that resonates with people on a deep level. One such film is It’s A wonderful Life (1946). While the film is about an angel showing a suicidal man why he is important, the town in which this story is framed is what I want to talk about. The town is called Bedford Falls. It’s a sleepy kind of town where people go about their lives in a relatively harmonious and neighborly way. This is due to the main character running a ‘Savings and Loan’ that helps people succeed. When the main character is no longer a part of the story (he is shown the town as it would have been had he not been born), the resulting town is Pottersville, named for the greedy and nasty town banker who runs everything in town for a personal profit of himself and his bank. The people in Pottersville as a result are also distrusting and selfish since life is hard and uncompromising. Whenever I ask people which town they prefer, they always tell me Bedford Falls, because it is a much pleasanter town where people are neighborly and look out for each other. Curiously, a mainstream economic review I read about the film touted Pottersville as a success because lots of money was generated. But, at what cost? The already rich banker just got richer while the townsfolk suffered in a dog-eat-dog type of community. Pottersville is a good view of what a ‘dispossessed’ type of living looks like. It is the supportive communalism of Bedford Falls that people like even if Pottersville is a sin-city where anything goes.
Life security that is based around money relies on you controlling your life through money. Lose the money and you lose control. If you live in a collaborative system, security is all the people around you. This is really about a quality of life issue and not standard of living. If we take the USA as a prime example of the current economy, after WWII, there was a lot of spare cash since the workers building for the war industry had little to spend their cash on because of rationing. Once the war was over, a large proportion of the war industry switched to building things for peacetime. In an unprecedented economic growth regulated by the government to prevent a reoccurrence of the great depression of the 1930s, there grew a large middle class. The economic growth from that point to now, as measured by the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), has continued unabated up to the present day. Yet, what really happened? As people used the money they had saved to buy homes, a multitude of labor-saving appliances, and the move to new styles of new neighborhoods, their standard of living increased and with it the quality of life (QOL). The year 1957 is significant as the point when the quality of life and the standard of living were matched. Then as the GDP showed a consistent climb, the QOL leveled off and started a long slow decline as the factors that made life good and bearable were lost. People became obsessed with earning money and buying goods to support the consumer mentality and a more hedonistic lifestyle. This was all predicated on a belief that more stuff and money somehow equated to QOL. The loss of community was accelerated by the loss of old-style neighborhoods, and pollution from ever growing industrialization that started to take its toll on overall health of people and the environment.
The growth of affluence naturally seemed synonymous with acquisition of money. So, people stopped thinking about the many other factors that constitute QOL, and accepted the economic line of thinking without question. Don’t get me wrong, when you are dirt poor (monetarily that is) making more money allows you to improve your SOL and for a short while the QOL rises with it. Yet, the dirt poor people usually lived within highly supportive interactive communities that indirectly supported the many factors that make up a healthy QOL – Community life (helping and encouraging others; volunteering; having close friends and socializing with people), Family life (extended close relationships with family, partner, friends), personal safety (everyone looking out for one another), Reading, listening to music, watching sports events, and other entertainment, and participating in active recreation, and satisfaction with life purpose. They had ambitions to improve their lives but the community setting helped them cope and manage with difficulties more easily.
We are many decades beyond that now, so what kinds of economic paradigms will allow us to maintain a great SOL and recapture the lost factors of QOL that we all truly yearn for now? What does it mean to ‘green’ the economy? To Be Continued…….
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