“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world” Howard Zinn.
Here in the USA, I just submitted this year’s tax return. Whether I like or dislike taxes, they are a fact of our modern lifestyles. How our ‘governments’ (at all levels) use our combined taxes is another matter altogether. I have always paid my taxes continuing to believe that they are a mechanism by which we share the cost of social issues. Wherever you are in the world, taxes seem to have become the norm, but what isn’t normal is how the hierarchical systems have abused that notion of shared social responsibility.
As we lost the connectiveness that once existed within communities and started outsourcing and commodifying everything, taxes became more of a mechanism of individuation and a way to maintain separateness. In essence we no longer found sharedness through service in helping each other, but handed over these community duties to paid professionals. Ironically, by individuating we lost our individual sovereignty and became regulated by technocratic policies that were increasingly privatized (e.g., given over to corporations) where maximized profit became the sole measure of success, and not community benefit. One of my favorite environmental philosophers is Wendell Berry who said, “If hard work made you rich, every farmer would be a billionaire. But they are not because the system does not reward labor, it rewards leverage. Modern Capitalism is about exploitation, not effort.”
The key word in that last quote is ‘modern capitalism.’ Like most people, I grew up thinking that capitalism was what it was. It didn’t particularly make complete sense to me, but I went along with it as everyone else did. As I was growing up, I knew economics wasn’t fair and it continued an economic class system, despite the growth of a middle class. It also seemed so complex that I believed only ‘economists’ could fathom its intricacies. If as a teenager, you had told me that I would be delving deeply into global macro-economics, I would have laughed at you – I was taking science and math that was far removed from the numeracy we know as economics. When I made a life change to study communication, education and environmental issues (before sustainability became a key word) understanding macro-economics was for me a prerequisite to understanding how the modern world functions.
One of the most eye-opening things about capitalism was that there are multiple models, and all of them work within sets of rules! There is nothing, except perhaps individual battering, as a ‘free-market’ in which exchanges somehow occur in an unrestricted void. Capitalism is about rules, how they are set, and who sets them. I have talked about our crazy economic system since my fist post in January, 2018 (see link). (You can find others in the blog under the economics category.) When I was researching ideas for my ‘Sustainable Living’ book I took a sabbatical (2010) in the British Isles and Holland, stopping off for a sustainability conference in Paris run by old soviet satellite countries (e.g., Estonia, Lithuania). I wanted to talk with people knowledgeable in sustainability from different perspectives – and so I set up lots of personal interviews.
I had read the economics books (Short Circuit, 1996; Growth Illusion, 1999, 2nd Ed; and The Ecology of Money, 1999) by retired English economist, Richard Douthwaite, and so arranged to meet with him in Eire (where he lived). I spent the day discussing his books and ideas about sustainability and alternate economic systems. For context, I pulled some basic information about him and him from online: “He was co-founder of Feasta (the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) an Irish based economic, social and environmental think tank. He had also been a council member of Comhar, the Irish government’s national sustainability council and a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute.”
And about his main books (which I recommend) from online: “Douthwaite’s first book, The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet was published in 1992 and was re-issued in an extended and up-dated second edition in 1999. It explores why the present economic system is dependent on economic growth and the effects that the resulting pursuit of growth has had on the environment and society. His other major book, Short Circuit (1996) gives dozens of examples of currency, banking, energy and food production systems which communities can use to make themselves less dependent on an increasingly unstable world economy. In The Ecology of Money, published in 1999, he calls for different currencies for different purposes and for changes in the way money is put into circulation so that a stable, sustainable economy can be achieved. In 2003 he edited Before the Wells Run Dry, a study of the transition to renewable energy in the light of climate change and oil and gas depletion.
After a long, casual, discussion with Richard Douthwaite, I like many of my readers, was looking for a simple and sage solution to our global economics that I could promote. I asked him what he envisioned a new sustainable global economy might look like? He looked at me for many long seconds without giving me an answer, and then just smiled. At that moment, my whole worldview transformed. A whole plethora of ideas we had been discussing flooded my mind. What I came away with, from meeting him, was that only by understanding the current macro-economic problem in its essence of how it ‘controls’ our lives will we make the changes we need. Our global economic system is at the core of our problems – physically, psychologically, and spiritually. I realized then, that there was no way to tweak our way out of our problems without transforming ourselves, thereby transforming the failing systems that we need to support us.
I will use ideas from Wendell Berry to highlight how our global economic system is destroying us. The economic damage is not confined just to our ecological systems. Our taxes lavish public money on corporations that come in and stay, only so long as they can exploit people and resources more cheaply than elsewhere. “The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve… We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don’t need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally” Wendell Berry
“It is commonly understood that governments are instituted to provide certain protections that citizens individually cannot provide for themselves. But governments have tended to assume that this responsibility can be fulfilled mainly by the police and the military. They have used their regulatory powers reluctantly and often poorly. Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless. Acts of economic aggression can destroy a landscape or a community or the center of a town or city, and they routinely do so”Wendell Berry.
Ecological harm, and hence human harm, by its “corporate perpetrators and their political abettors is done in the in the name of the “free market” and “free enterprise.” By default, this creates “freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods” Wendell Bery.
“There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferance’s impossible to justify” Wendell Berry.
So, if there isn’t a simple global economic system that will solve our problems and give us sovereignty over our lives, what is there?
To Be Continued ……….
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