No recent questions from this blogs readership. When I am out and about taking with people about sustainability, the usual response to my proposal of a complete change in how we use an economy, garners disbelief and denial that such an epic change could actually happen. Let me be clear, there are numerous economic models. The global market economy that currently, and negatively, dominates our lives is just one model. This model was captured and ruled by financial elites who rigged it completely in their favor, and money became the end-goal in itself. But what is money really? It’s an abstract idea for managing resources. You can live without money – our earlier ancestors did quite well. But as we developed larger societies the economy and especially money became a convenience – a tool. However, as a consumer society, things changed radically once money became, first, its acquisition as a means to control, and more recently an end-goal in itself.
Social synthesist Eileen Workman has written extensively about this idea. “It seems ironic that the one product humanity believes it cannot survive without — money — is the only ‘resource’ that must be translated into actual life force energy before it means anything at all. Money is not food. It is not water. It is not shelter. It is not safety. It simply represents a future claim on ‘guaranteed’ access to these things. Yet a future claim is only meaningful if whatever is being claimed still exists. The more money we produce in a system where planetary resources are already owned, gated, and inherited, the more intensely we compete for access to what was once freely available — air, land, water, community, belonging.”
The ’Rat-Race’, the ‘Dog-eat-dog’ world we know so well, exists because we allowed resources to be privatized into the hands of a few financial elites – the hierarchies (or Cabal) as I am fond of calling them. To do well in this kind of world, you must follow the economic ‘rules’ that run this system. You either inherited monetary wealth, or you were lucky enough to have something of need that these financial elites were willing to pay you to obtain. The rest of us are just serfs that do all the grunt work. The simple idea running this system is that incentives reward accumulation over circulation, but natural systems do not thrive on accumulation, they thrive on flow. In the natural world it is energy flow. In our current human world, it is currently money.
As such, everything that occurs in the world should be seen from the perspective of a ‘Business Model.’ War and environmental degradation are just political tools in this business model. Human and planetary welfare do not factor into this business model. Trying to tweak changes to make this business model fairer can’t work, because this business model is amoral and focused on profits only not people or planet. People at the very top are evil. Most in the higher echelons of power (in whatever aspect of society) are just sociopathic – they got their jobs because they were meaner, inherently dishonest, great at plotting and scheming to elevate their status, and just-plain rotten to the core – our global economic system rewards these kinds of people. But it isn’t who we are. Eileen Workman. Most others involved in this model are just struggling to somehow thrive within the system, doing their jobs without asking inconvenient questions because they are afraid of being ejected from this model, not understanding that other models exist that promote planetary welfare that make life, in all its forms, better.
As Workman states so eloquently in highlighting the human obsession with money: “Blood that pools clots. Water that stagnates putrefies. Energy that concentrates destabilizes. When [monetary] wealth stops circulating and begins hoarding at scale, the entire organism strains to compensate. The poor feel it as scarcity. The middle class feels it as anxiety and pressure. The wealthy often feel it as the fear of loss. Meanwhile, the planet groans under the extraction required to honor ever-expanding financial claims on its future productivity. Which begs the sharp, though most often ignored, critical question: What will extreme wealth buy in a destabilized biosphere?” The obvious answer has to be how we focus on a system that thrives from a system that destabilizes. It can’t be how much can I accumulate monetarily, but how can I ensure that life, and the biosphere thrive so that we can thrive. This is where my Items 2 and 3 come in.
The real wealth of a healthy civilization is not counted in money trillions, but: “It is counted in breathable air, fertile soil, resilient communities, and children born into access so they can become their greatest version of their grandest inner vision of themselves — not into debt. If we do not restore circulation, the organism weakens. If we do restore it, [true] prosperity becomes regenerative instead of extractive” Eileen Workman.
In 2008, because of greed and corruption at the highest levels of world banking, the global economy was on the brink of collapse. It essentially survived because in every country, the governments, using public money (e.g., our taxes) bailed out the banks. What did the bankers do? Invest the money in other lucrative schemes, give themselves bonuses, and while laughing, shit in the faces of the very people who bailed them out. And they are still doing it. While doomsayers exist all through the economic media, it is looking likely that a repeat of 2008 may occur again. Whether it comes from the bursting of the AI bubble, through disastrous devaluation of various currencies around the world, or some other calamitous economic boondoggle, the potential for global economic failure looms large in our lives. The billionaires and corporations who now hold the bulk of global capital (i.e., hoarding the money and owning the ‘commons’) are unlikely to bail anyone out, without getting full control of world governments. And I’m sure all under the pretense of saving us from the catastrophe they are responsible for in the first place. (I find it fascinating that the Showcase SciFy time travel series ‘Continuum‘ was premised by this kind of situation!)
It is a terrifying worse-case scenario for most people to think that their life savings and everything they worked for could disappear overnight – not one I relish. Yet, it would offer the majority of humankind an opportunity to restart a new kind of society where human and biosphere welfare was first and foremost in the reconstruction with a new kind of economic system where we the people write the rules. How that happens, should economic collapse occur is quite open to two very different paths and interpretations.
The hierarchical interpretation. Klaus Schwab, in 2018 at the WEF, famously said, “You will own nothing and be happy.” The quote he gives is from a 2016 essay by the Danish politician Ida Auken who had written about an idea of a future caring-sharing economic society. I don’t think that Schwab’s interpretation is philanthropic, in that the financial elites remake a better society for us. I think he was talking about a global neo-feudal autocracy where the ‘state’ provides everything – think grim Stalinism not Scadinavian socialism. Under criticism, the WEF clarified that it has no stated goal to have individuals “own nothing and be happy”, and that its Agenda 2030 framework includes individual ownership and control over private property. Like the Georgia Guidestones (see link) the devil is in the details. If the overwhelming majority of people around the world no longer have financial assets, who exactly are the individuals that will own and control private property? That’s not a hard question to answer. Consider the British Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries, which curiously happened everywhere in the industrial world, as a useful example. These clearances are still occurring in developing countries today as developed countries manipulate poor governments to grant them favors, especially land grabs.
The peoples’ interpretation. With a financial collapse, the financial elites – who own all the land and assets – will posture to proclaim themselves the ‘new lords of the manor’ and try to keep control of the masses. Now extrapolate all that I have talked about with this ‘profit at all costs’ bottom line and look at how all aspects of our modern society are controlled by this dangerous economic worldview. As an example, your healthcare and food production have been maximized for profit production even if it means that toxins and ‘sickcare’ as well as degradation of the biosphere are manipulated to create profit. Well-being literally cannot exist within this worldview. Healthy people and a healthy planet are completely incompatible with profit generation under this market economy. All of us are merely items for profit generation, which is why no amount of tweaking can resolve our problems. Hence my items 2 and 3 (new economics and new foci of quality of life) are really the only options we have to create a better world – we do it for ourselves and dismiss the current hierarchical controllers. Really, we just begin at the grassroots and begin from scratch. That sounds really scary, but we all know what is happening. Changes are already occurring everywhere you look (don’t listen to the mass media), we just need to wake up and then help others wake up as well. What is true growth? Not money, that’s for sure.
I heard a mixed metaphor the other day that says it well. Our current global economy is like the first-class passengers on the Titanic congratulating the ship’s pastry chef after the ship has already struck the iceberg. And most modern attempts to solve the sinking problem are like the first-class stewards rearranging the deckchairs to make the first-class passengers more comfortable. And like the movie, the mass of us have been shuttered in steerage so the first-class don’t have to hear our cries for help. Time to help ourselves.
To Be Continued …………………
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