Econosophy and other musings

UN Tells It Like It Is

2012-01-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

The world can no longer afford to ignore the environmental cost of economic growth and must redefine the very concept of national wealth, a UN panel of heads of state and environment ministers said Monday.

Link

Now, the UN is only the UN, but at least this will get some press. Please spread this as far as your circle of friends, online and otherwise, allows.

Once we recognise, across all sectors of society, that Perpetual Growth is a poison, and that our monetary system forces it upon us, we see clearly the depth of change necessary. I am for negative interest money, guaranteed income, expansion of the commons and open education (a deep revolution in education) as first steps to put humanity on a path which has the best chance of giving rise to a far more sustainable and socially healthy system. Such ideas need to be widely aired and discussed, but I think something like them will prove to be essential once we have accepted that Perpetual Growth is our primary problem.

I think this report is very good news.

The Leader's Prayer

2012-01-29T01:24:00.000-08:00

Our Leader, who’s art is power,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy nation come,
thy will be done
to us, as desired by power.
Give us this day our daily dose,
And forbid us all trespassing,
as we fear those who trespass against us.
And lead us not from addiction,
but surround us with evil.
For thine is the Nation, the Power and the Money,
for ever and ever.

Amen

To Belong or Not to Belong, That is the Value

2012-01-26T02:38:00.000-08:00

According to Tor Hernes, co-author and co-editor of “Autopoietic Organization Theory”, there is among scientists today a growing “desire to relax the demand on theory as a means of prediction, [ … to see theory instead] as a means of providing plausible explanations of evolutions and particular phenomena.”(My emphasis.) Plausible explanations of particular phenomena. In other words, we are asked to embrace uncertainty, or, less poetically, to accept that total exactness is impossible. Theory, or hypothesis, is a core component of the scientific method. To request that it need not yield totally accurate predictions, merely plausible predictions, is to question the efficacy of Falsificationism. In Falsificationism, a theory must be testable to be falsifiable. If a theory is not falsifiable—that is, if it cannot be proven wrong—that theory cannot be scientific. A theory asserting God created the world, or that luck is part of successful gambling, is not falsifiable for all sorts of reasons, and therefore not scientific. It can be neither proved nor disproved because it can make no accurate prediction. Thus, to soften this foundation stone is to soften science, to step away from David Hume’s admonition to consign the unmeasurable to fire:

“Let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it contains nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

Hume, that ‘pragmatic’ philosopher, wanted nothing to do with fripperies such as love, or caring, or friendship, or luck, because such subjective experiences cannot be measured. The position is that if a thing cannot be measured, it cannot therefore exist. If it cannot exist, yet we think it does, it must then be an illusion. That in itself is a very strong assertion, a very aggressive theory, which, irony of ironies, is itself not falsifiable. For we cannot prove or disprove a theory that unmeasurable things cannot exist—we can’t measure them! So, Hernes’ soft-sounding request is evidence of a softening at science’s heart (albeit small evidence) I consider noteworthy and important. This is the deep background of this post.

The more immediate background is the ‘urge to belong’ Jeremy Rifkin cites as a primary human drive more fundamental to us than greed and selfishness. This is an interesting assertion, one I tend to agree with. However, it is not as controversial as it first seems, nor all that disruptive to current neo-Darwinian theory, since the urge to belong is likely an emergent property of being a social animal, which we humans most certainly are (even psychopaths ‘need’ a society to interact with, to feed on, and are darkly fascinated by our empathy, our rich emotions). Furthermore, the need to belong can be seen as the underpinning of selfishness and greed. For example, we may be producing hoards of unhealthily greedy and immaturely selfish people, simply because they feel like they don’t belong, strongly suspect society does not need them. This problem correlates closely with value—what do we value, how do we measure it, and how do we distribute what we have so measured (reward and punishment)? (Economics attempts to answer these questions.) But value is a subjective phenomenon impossible to measure (even with money), a delicious challenge which has been too far from our cultural mind for far too long. Economics is, in my opinion, the sequestering of richly subjective value assessments from the wider culture into the hands of the owners of wealth, where value has been standardised into money. And that process is one of the many consequences of elitism, which is itself, I suspect, an immature stage of human development which emerged from specialisation and humanity’s Ascent, its battle to control and master all of nature.

This post takes a brief look at these two phenomena, and ekes out a connection between them. To belong we must be valued, in some way, by the group to which we wish to belong. Do we need to accurately and explicitly measure value (money) in order to measure belonging, or can we have a far more open society (say, one built around resource-based economics) which thrives in the absence of an explicit and standardised measure of value?

Those like me, who hope for some form of anarchist/RBE (resource-based economy) world, are happy to see the urge to belong characterised as a stronger driver of human behaviour than competition, selfishness, or greed, since such a future mode would be built on cooperation and sharing. But, isn’t belonging a survival urge? We ‘belong’ when we are important to our group in some way, whether as a leader or entertainer or thinker or scientist or whatever; we feel we belong when what we contribute to our group visibly (this is subtly different from ‘explicitly’) helps it thrive and enjoy life. It is difficult imagining someone truly belonging to a group while being of no use to it whatsoever, contributing absolutely nothing. Always taking, never giving. We have to contribute to belong, and we need to belong. Can everyone everywhere belong to some group somewhere, be important to some people somehow? For the first time since our ‘primitive’ beginnings, I think so, and the Internet is key here, but—this is a huge “BUT!!!”—, not while money is our sole measure of value; money is just too crude and clumsy—air has a value of zero in money’s eyes, for example.

But regardless of our opinion on that, the urge to belong probably stems from the urge to survive, where, very importantly, the quality of survival is highly significant, ‘valuable,’ we could almost say vital. Humans aren’t really alive, when all they do is survive. And it is not only fear and scarcity fuelling the need to belong. Even though belonging to a group means better protection from the ravages of the wild, or the ‘safety in numbers’ principle of each relying on and helping the other, the question today should be, relying on each other for what, and to achieve what quality of life? That asked, is a quality-based inter-dependency of people constructively and sustainably binding? Could such an open and abundant society keep us healthily cohesive, when something vague and unmeasurable like quality of life is the implied reward and motivator, and not something immediate and palpable like blank survival? If existential angst were largely removed via technological development, could we humans cope with that much comfort, freedom of movement, absence of oppression? In “The Matrix”, the AI Computer Overlords construct a perfect virtual reality for their human slaves, but it backfires horribly. Entire crops are lost. Humans, concludes the AI machine, need misery and suffering to thrive. The film’s joke is funny, because we all have that kind of fear somewhere inside us. Things can be too good to be true.

In a full-on, Venus Project, resource-based economy, in which we “constantly maximise existing and future technologies with the sole purpose of enhancing all human life and protecting the environment” (Jacque Fresco), there would be close to no existential angst, certainly not for material reasons. Societal ‘interbeingness’ (to coin an Eisensteinian phrase), or interdependence, would be pleasure- and project-based, functionally speaking, not fear- and scarcity-based. We would not be meeting base needs like food and shelter by contributing and being important—such things would be available for ‘free.’ We would contribute to meet social needs like kudos, joy, belonging, reputation, respect. Our reasons for contributing, the manner in which we feel we make ourselves useful to some group or other, would be greatly different to today, where job and income are symbols and proof of our contribution to society. There would be new symbols for sure, but far richer, more contextualized, less fixed, less linear, than $, € and ¥.

Is all this a pipe dream? Are humans in fact unhealthily greedy and immaturely selfish 'by design'? Is it our ‘wiring’ makes us so? I say no, and one look at the Piraha or other ‘primitive’ peoples confirms this. We lived for hundreds of thousands of years without money-symbols of success and motivation, without ‘exact’ measures of value. All sorts of discoveries, such as taming fire, grain and beast; farming and metallurgy; specialisation; states, nation states and corporations; and elitism separate us from ‘primitives,’ but our genes are largely unchanged. These discoveries, these bio-social pressures, are recent phenomena on a biological time-frame. We are not ‘wired’ to be unhealthily greedy, immaturely selfish. Such are reasonable behavioural adjustments to environmental conditions.

(For the record, I do not think The Venus Project is going to flower as suggested by Jacque Fresco, but it does represent a powerful set of ideas, which brings into sharp relief the important questions of motivation and value. On the other hand, I do believe that our developmental arc is—if we seize this opportunity creatively—generally towards The Venus Project, or at least towards a recourse-based economics (no one yet knows what such a thing will look like), but the path thither (to use archaic language), should we tread it, will be Eisensteinian, or like this.)

Again, we are obliged to recall that we are social animals, not wolverines or tigers or trapdoor spiders, that therefore our social needs are neither weak nor ignorable. On a broader note, and by way of suggesting we are very flexible social animals, richly varied, I strongly suspect relationships—society’s glue—would necessarily be more supple; marriage would wither away, and blind loyalty—staying true to one partner, ideology, etc., no matter what—would be much rarer, perhaps non-existent. One consequence of this should be that Big Brother entities and institutions become impossible. The social soil suggested by the principles and trains of thought of resource-based economics could not be a breeding ground for systems of paranoia and control. Systems emerge from and are sustained by environmental conditions enabling them. They adapt to new environmental conditions, or die. Similarly, social systems emerge from and are sustained by an enabling social environment. Even institutional power to manipulate perception and paradigm via propaganda is not total, nor immortal.

If our general trajectory now (for sure a very turbulent one) is ever less economic activity for humans (this is key), and less disruptive susceptibility to vagaries of nature such as famine and drought (assuming the spread of all sorts of positive technological outcomes for a moment, including technologies like permaculture and wise management of commons), that trajectory will generate more ‘leisure’ time alongside an intelligently shared abundance. In such an atmosphere of abundance and ease, what pressures would be felt by people to acquiesce to group demands? Principally, the ‘inner’ (human-systemic) urge to belong, as shaped by the general sharing and cooperation of honest and transparent social structures made necessary by a new economic and environmental reality. Greed and selfishness would find new forms of expression. We would be ‘greedy’ for accomplishment, new adventures, stimulating challenges; ‘selfish’ in our support of those systems enabling and sustaining our quality of life.

If, on the other hand, our trajectory is forced towards generating ever more work and economic activity, a.k.a., the Pillage of Perpetual Growth, humanity will implode in the frenzy, and do deeper harm to ecosystems everywhere.

For my part, I believe there will be less and less economic activity for humans, less Growth—because of technological unemployment, falling population growth, the Internet, the death of consumerism, Open Source, global warming, soil fertility, water tables, and other such variables. Therefore, the RBE trajectory—‘high-tech’ style—seems the more logical … assuming sufficient, clean energy sources.

On energy briefly. After fossil fuels are exhausted, or become too energy-costly to extract, there are many who believe the EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) humans enjoy will return to some 1.n to 1 ratio evident elsewhere in nature. Today, oil yields somewhere between 10-15 to 1. It yielded about 100-1 a century ago. If what awaits us is pre-fossil fuel energy, humanity goes ‘back’ to tilling the fields. Or, if we’re luckier, ‘forwards’ to permaculture. But I simply cannot believe an EROEI of 1.n awaits humanity after fossil fuels are no longer sufficiently available to us. Wind reliably delivers around 20, solar around 5 to 1 and rising, and new technologies promise more than that, including cold fusion (now re-branded as Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) to make it more palatable). A steady state economics would need an EROIE about 10-1 (I dimly recall reading somewhere, but don’t quote me on that). Without consumerism; wasteful suburban sprawl; moronic Monday-Friday, nine-to-five work weeks; with intelligently designed cities, transportation systems, super-efficient housing, etc., our energy consumption would fall dramatically. (Far more troubling than energy are concerns like water and soil. These are not (quite yet) deal breakers, as far as I’m aware. Global warming might be.)

Obviously, I cannot know how all this pans out, but toying with ideas, encouraging critical thinking, discussion, and ‘independent’ study, helps us arrive at better ‘decisions.’ How ‘problematic’ is it that the urge to belong is ‘selfish?’ Well, taking care of that which takes care of us makes very clear sense. We are social. It therefore makes sense to take care of the society we cannot help but want to belong to. ‘Exactly’ how we do this, that devil in the detail, cannot be known. Ever. Even now. For who can explain exactly how it all works today, let alone in a distant tomorrow?

And is all this simply a new way of saying ‘enlightened self-interest,’ that tired, old chestnut? Have I just laid out yet another (updated?) take on Smith’s Invisible Hand? Perhaps. But a new perspective on, or perception of, an old devil helps sometimes. We don’t snap over to completely new ways of being, we slowly and disjointedly transcend, or emerge from, current ones. Maybe the market doesn’t take care of business, but ‘enlightened’ or long term self-interest might make a better fist of it, as money is demoted, and wealth (real value) promoted. Somehow. Ditto embracing uncertainty. How does that really work? How do we bring that into science? Again, I don’t know. Somehow, there is always a mystery ingredient X involved. When you plan, you cannot cross all the Ts and dot all the Is in advance, and know, 100%, you’re right. X was, is and always will be.

In conclusion, I believe we are in the midst of a sweet irony. It is science and its methodologies which have yielded the potential wisdom to ‘return’ to far more ‘anarchic,’ far less state-run, social systems; federated communities interconnected with Internet and database management technologies. But, we will only plant our feet firmly on that path, after we give up on the religious dogma that only the measurable exists. Money is the conduit between the two, since value—which money purports to measure—cannot be measured. I find it absolutely fascinating, and detect here the poetic mind of god at work, that money—a symbol measuring the unmeasurable as economics struggles to be ‘scientific’—stands between us and our continuing development, and that a softening of science’s heart can help light the way.

Franz Hörmann on the Future of Money and Politics

2012-01-21T03:30:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while since I translated any Hörmann output, so I thought I’d raise his profile a little once again, not because his profile or anyone else’s is important, but rather because the idea-domain he represents is gathering focus, generating momentum—at least, it strongly seems that way to me. It’s not that this or that person is totally correct, it’s that we all contribute, bring ourselves to the game, learn, teach, change, compromise. This takes time, discussion and effort. What Hörmann does particularly well is get across fresh perspectives quickly and incisively. He commands a broad landscape too, does not just speak from the position of an economist or sociologist, but rather as a human fascinated with all of reality, imparting what he has learned in as open, fresh and engaging a way as he is able.

There’s also though—in direct contradiction to my above assertion that the idea-domain Franz Hörmann, Charles Eisenstein, Peter Joseph, Jacque Fresco and others represent is coalescing, finding form—an apparent period of retrenchment, stability, business as normal, now taking place, which, somewhat eerily in my view, has been emanating from the mainstream these last few weeks. This is probably just me, but the world feels strangely fragile, on tenterhooks, as if it daren’t breathe too loudly for fear of waking the now slumbering monster under the bed. The markets are happy enough, with the Dow having achieved close to it’s highs of pre-August, prior to the 20% mini-crash that began in mid-summer. Europe limps on, bowed but not defeated, Japan floats above its floor somehow, UK markets vibrate robustly enough between US and European crises, while China continues to defy every doom-laden prediction hurled its way. Brazil, India, Russia and Argentina are also keeping up appearances pretty well. And Iran has not yet been attacked. At least not with bombs. Good stuff, I suppose. But it all feels very staged, troubled, fake, and hollow. The vital juice has run dry. Everything and everyone is a nervous paper tiger, wondering when the first rip will show.

Hörmann boldly predicted the end of the money system last year. It did not happen. At least, it did not happen in a way we can all agree on. My feeling is that the entire financial system is indeed broken beyond repair, that TPTB’s ability to lend it the mechanical appearance of life is itself evidence of this breakdown. Enormous amounts of money have been poured into the markets’ cup, given to the speculators to keep their game going, so the bewitching lights of the casino can twinkle on. Yet we know money is not air, not water, not food, that so-called ‘efficient markets’ do not deliver as advertised. We are in a twilight zone, an unreality, a post-dream fog we dare not disturb. Of those tasked with keeping this system ‘functional’ a while longer, then a bit longer than that, then just another minute or two, not one wants out of bed and into the work of building the new. In this lull, this eery hush before the storm, Hörmann is quietly putting together a political party, in Austria, with various scientists, to try and create a platform for introducing their ideas to a wider public. Part of that process is conducting interviews then posted on YouTube. What follows is excerpts from one of the most recent (recorded in Vienna on 19th December 2011).

Interviewer (I): You predicted a great crash which—and I don’t know whether to say ‘shame’ or ‘thank goodness’—has not happened yet. Your thoughts on this?

Franz Hörmann (FH): Well, that’s a good question. Did it really happen? It’s a question of how we define what we mean by ‘crash.’ The Euro, for example, still exists in its current form today only because the German Constitution and the Treaty of Lisbon and other agreements have been transgressed. The rules have simply been ignored. When we say ‘currency,’ we’re talking about a set of rules, with a particular priority which gets ranked one way or the other. Then there’s constitutional rules, and international rules, which have their own ranking. Then the question is, which is more important? Do we see the Treaty of Lisbon as more important than the Euro? Or, do we say the continuation of the illusion of the Euro, as a set of rules, is more important to us than some treaty that represents the people, then transgress there? Had we upheld the German Constitution and the Treaty of Lisbon there would be no more Euro in its current form, and we would have had a ‘crash.’ So it’s a question of how we define ‘crash.’ Politicians, and those who control—or think they control—the money system, take ever more ridiculous measures—for example falsifying national economic data and similar tricks—just to keep the illusion, the facade of a functioning money system going, for the people, or a tiny group of the people who benefit particularly well from it. But it’s as plain as day that this will lead to ever more absurd outcomes, and that this can’t be kept going much longer. The next question is how the broader public will take all this. The longer we draw this game out, the more absurd, the more grotesque the ‘crash’ will be.

[snip]

I: Aren’t you worried that a [political] party of scientists will be inaccessible to the broader public, a public which has not studied to the same level?

FH: Not at all. We’re pulling representatives from all social classes on board with us. One fundamental aim we have is creating a new form of language whose ‘job’ it is to help bring together the now divided classes. [Earlier in the interview Hörmann singles out the different way in which the different classes communicate as a fundamental societal problem, citing ‘information asymmetry’ as an ‘economic good’ generating profit, a term other members of society think of negatively as ‘deception’ and ‘fraud.’] This is a key goal of our political movement. One part of that will be psychological rehabilitation, healing our wounds. Regardless of which social class we come from, we come with wounds and a fixed sense of who the Enemy Other is. This has to be healed, transformed, and this has to happen with the help of specialist psychologists, who can help us heal our sense of injury and forgive those we see as our enemies. Only thereafter will it be possible for society to work cooperatively. We already know a deep level of cooperation is possible, as Open Source is showing us the way here.

[snip]

I: How can you prevent corruption and cynical manipulation of the new system, seeing as such an enormous network will have to be computer-controlled to a large degree?

FH: In the new system, money has a different function, and cannot be anonymously exchanged between people, or companies, or institutions, etc. Such will no longer be possible. All exchanges will consist of a plan, a contract and a process. And plan, contract and process are parts of the same data structure. Each person is connected to this data structure via a unique identifier, and a person can only complete a process if the corresponding contract authorizes them to do so, and contracts can only arise if they mirror the [mumbled]. The whole thing is self-organizing, tightly interconnected, so it’s simply impossible, on a whim, to exchange some enormous money amount, anonymously transfer money somewhere... That just doesn’t make sense any more. [This is a very quickly spoken section, and, as the interview was conducted in a bar, there is plenty of loudly recorded background noise interfering too.] And for the daily needs of the people, we’ll set up, as quickly as possible, a comprehensive guaranteed provision, not income, since an income means we’d be furnishing people with purchasing power. Guaranteed income would be injections of purchasing power into an economy which might not be able to back it [i.e. it would be inflationary]. Obviously we want to avoid a consequent raising of prices by companies. We must, therefore, ensure price stability with regulated prices, by democratically deciding, within this system, to increase the production of required goods and services, and not raise prices, where demand is higher than supply. And in this rather careful manner, we can protect the people, then, in the next step, we can attempt to allocate resources optimally. Today we don’t have this at all. We have sub-optimal resource allocation, because the finance sector—which, in truth, contributes the least to society—is able to assign to itself ownership of the majority of the resources, and not, for example, to workers.

I: Isn’t there a danger that we’ll just be creating some monstrous Big Brother state, monitoring our every transaction and economic move?

FH: If we monitor everything, we have to be careful about who is doing the monitoring. When ‘democracy’ monitors itself, in a social network, monitoring then makes sense, because it prevents abuse. That should be our goal. It prevents abuse and, by extension, exploitation. Just think about the children forced into slave labour in Asia. That sort of thing would be flat out impossible in such a social network. We can only produce on the basis of democratically reached decisions. [I just want to point out at this stage that Hörmann realizes there is a danger of the tyranny of the majority over the minority; a deep revolution in education is the most important aspect of his project. Without the correct educational soil, everything he proposes is impossible.] Democratic decisions aren’t set in stone, are not laws made permanent because they are written down in hundreds of pages, they exist electronically as a database, a ‘rulebase,’ from which the contracts are generated. Thus it is impossible for the contracts to transgress the principles giving rise to them. This security concept is absolutely vital to the project. That is, rules will be decided in electronic form, with everyone’s contribution involved, small groups (areas) at a time [very mumbled section, and a machine makes a loud noise at this point], [guessed: in pyramid-like form, decisions pulled upwards…], or you can cede your decision to an expert you trust, as in the ‘liquid democracy’ concept… There are so many possibilities in this area we must experiment with, develop, to find out what works best. But this is an exciting new area. For the first time in history, we have the opportunity to make all laws transparent and simple to understand, to ensure that contracts cannot be transgressed. We actually have the requisite technology for this today, so we must take this opportunity to bring it about. This kind of opportunity doesn’t come around very often!

To transcend the foreseeable need of the people, we propose founding a democratic national bank, which would create money out of thin air, against its capital; a legal tender money with purchasing power for particular purposes democratically decided. That is, only on a scale and for purposes which are democratically legitimated. Because the bank’s capital will be distributed to the people, the bank furnishes the people with their purchasing power. Then, of course, the amounts in circulation must accord with the amount of goods and services available, so as to prevent inflation and deflation. This implies the price mechanism must be included [in the design]. If we want to take care of everyone, we take care too of businesses and business owners, who are no longer to be driven by the profit motive of today’s paradigm. On top of this we have the guaranteed basic provision, and we’ll also be able to, if necessary, distribute luxury goods in other ways, albeit with cooperative principles, not competitive. With cooperative practices, we can more rapidly render disliked work superfluous. [I suspect he’s talking about automation here.] We'll have first to apply ourselves most to those jobs no one wants to do, make ourselves redundant, as it were, for which successes we can reward the ‘guilty’ parties, and free many more to pursue other, more enjoyable careers in which they want to work harder, contribute more, thus benefiting society more.

Long-term, we could build a system in which a backend manages the resources, and only at the front end, at the user interface, would money be used (though it wouldn’t look like today's money). One day, perhaps there’d be no more money at all. Even in today’s system, money is, seen in a certain light, a user interface between person and society. When I do something for society, I earn money. When I want something from society, I pay money. Money is thus a user interface, and a user interface can be personalized! In our proposed system, we will, with the help of trained psychological assistants, be able to create, for everyone, an individual money system which corresponds to that person’s psychological development and stage of life. Whether he or she wants to [mumbled] and doesn’t need to buy that much, or if he or she selects some super qualification to take, they’ll be protected and financed by society, since society knows it is benefited by those it usefully supports.

And that’s enough from me (Toby). The interview, as I said, was conducted in a bar. It’s been very arduous trying to make sense of the various mumbled parts. My brain hurts. Obviously these are fragments of a much larger and very comprehensive programme of ideas, but I think there’s a benefit from such a fragmented presentation to the non-German speaker, in that we are forced to do more of our own thinking when there are gaps to fill in. Asking questions, trying to answer them via discussion and argument, is far more educational and constructive than being asked to follow, with 100% loyalty, some pre-written formula handed down to us by some Great One. As I argued in my recent post, we get the system we deserve. To deserve a better system, we have to build it. Obviously. And want to. And know how to (at least, have a good idea of how to). Hence, Hörmann’s ideas, even in bits and pieces, should (hopefully) encourage thought and debate, not blind loyalty, and, for those interested, inspire further learning and research.

On Interest, Cyclicality and Sonnets

2012-01-15T05:11:00.000-08:00

More nuance today from the man who likes to drive his readership to distraction with prevarication and belligerent fence-sitting. Confession: I am no conviction politician. I believe there are alternatives, even to the alternatives. TINA (There Is No Alternative) can go hang. Which is of course conviction of sorts, but I remain widely open as to implementation and evolution of the new, not to mention being something of a moral relativist.

In that vein, you are today to be treated to a kind of homage to the dying system I have spent so much of my time and energy battling and critiquing these last years. It was a damn good system in many ways, particularly at driving growth, and at generating and sustaining elitism (which has been mostly appropriate for this ‘post-primitive’ portion of the human journey). Nothing which flourishes out to the global scale and produces the degree of cohesion it produced can be called utterly defective, even considering its rapacious heart, its sociopathic soul, its inflexible limbs, its machine-like viscera. For it to be ‘bad’ in net effect, for it to be seen, generally, as broken, requires an evolution of consciousness in the vast majority of us; first we must learn the necessary perceptive abilities culturally. Until that happens, what was once ‘good’ will continue its collapse, something like ‘human nature’ will cop the blame, yet another iteration of this paradigm will be tried again, and the TINA Brigade will have been proven right. Speaking brutally, until humanity builds a flourishing alternative, there is no alternative. We have to earn it. Ideas on pages aren’t enough.

So, what is dying, why is it dying, and why was it ‘good?’ Charles Eisenstein’s analysis in “The Ascent of Humanity” is as thorough an analysis of our paradigm as I have seen, and I strongly agree with it. In his thesis, humanity emerged from undifferentiated unison with its environment, many thousands of years ago, to begin the long, slow process we call Civilization. With the advent of technologies like taming fire, domesticating seeds and animals, humans unwittingly initiated for themselves a developmental arc characterized by ever increasing ‘separation’ from and opposition to Not-Self, indeed created an ever more clearly delineated Not-Self. In the Bible, the myth which echoes this is Adam and Eve’s eviction from Eden. Today we might see a baby’s eviction from its mother’s womb as a similar break. Thus we begin a sense of Us and Them when the area within the warmth and light of the ‘controlled’ fire is safe, the darkness beyond dangerous; when some aspects of nature become clear enemies—insect pests, winter, adverse weather—and others friends—wheat, chicken, dog, horse. The pattern is one of increasingly sophisticated control of both wanted and unwanted variables, so as to maximize the former and minimize the latter. We are still engaged in this fight against Not-Self today, looking for the perfect life, the perfect partner, job, city, system, etc.

One of the many emergent properties of this developmental arc has been elitism (the state), which, to me, is a necessary social dynamic for keeping increasingly complex societies cohesive (specialization plays an enormous role here). Of course there are negatives, but nothing is perfect, so that goes without saying. And there is no master plan. Shit just happens. Early humans taming fire, domesticating seed and beast, had not the slightest idea where their experimentation would lead. It is not better or worse to be differentiated, just as there is nothing ‘ignoble’ about undifferentiated ‘savages.’ Shit just happens, and beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. So, for one thousand and one reasons, elitism emerged and bedded down, no master plan necessary. You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs.

As a brief aside, for a long time I believed elitism’s structure was wedded to growth and therefore inherently unsustainable. I no longer hold that opinion. Elitism is doomed because it suffers poor information flow. As to growth, there is a far simpler explanation for our systemic addiction to it. It is because we tend not to kill our children or old folk when population pressures might recommend such measures (rabbits eat their young); we are inventive, have powerful emotions, and seek solutions that offer the ‘hope’ of letting as many of us live as possible. This simple dynamic is sufficient to explain why the human race has been multiplying, and continues to want to. That we thrive exponentially like bacteria today is an explosive consequence of science, fossil fuels and good hygiene. Elitism (hierarchical state structures of rulers and ruled) is a ‘necessary’ emergent property of differentiated social animals with abstract language dealing with the challenges of increasingly complex tribal life (specialization), population pressures, and war (and other things too, but those are the main factors I feel). We thrived because we wanted to, and could. In many ways, our ‘control’ of nature has proven very effective. Mainly, we still see our continuing expansion as Good, but this is changing quickly. I believe there are two main driving factors for this shift of perception; technological unemployment and Peak Growth (a complex term which includes fossil fuel depletion, climate change, peak debt, etc.).

While we have earned no ‘better’ system; while we have not made it clear to ourselves, culturally, globally even, that an open, egalitarian-hierarchical hybrid based on abundance and sharing is now the more ‘sensible’ arrangement; while we prefer our comfort zones to the perils of change, we will not be able to transcend what, to me and some others, is a broken (not ‘evil’) paradigm. We must evolve out of where we are and into what we might be, which takes doing, trial and error, experimentation, and time. As always, we accumulate wisdom along the way, stand on giants’ shoulders, who themselves stood on others’ shoulders, but cannot know where it will take us, just as our long dead forebears playing with fire could not see far by its light. Clearly, the vast majority of us do not yet want to put in the degree of effort deep change requires, again for a thousand and one reasons. So, competition, scarcity, ‘I’m all right, Jack,’ classism, property, greed, short-termism, etc., will be with us for a while yet, warts and all. Indeed, they are some of the key elements which drove us here, cooked us into what we culturally are. They are the main ingredients of our current stew, and, like the frog which cannot tell it is being cooked alive because the water’s temperature increases so slowly, so we too fail to discern how hot it is getting. This too is changing. We are waking up and smelling the fire.

And yet, back in the day, with the knowledge and ignorance of the time, what ‘better’ money system could humanity have designed, what better social arrangement? Like nature, our system is cyclical; boom and bust, spring and winter, growth and decay. It has an incentive built in; the absence in the money supply of the interest owed acts as a constant flame, keeps things cooking, and fosters growth, rather like the sun around which all earthly life revolves. Believing in human Ascent, a system which helps drive us forward is no bad thing, especially when we ‘know’ humans tend to laziness ‘by nature.’ If we believe, more or less, that we ought to grow our economy forever, with boom and bust included, as fulfillment of our Destiny, then a fiat, usurious, debt-based money system is a ‘good’ way to go. There are casualties of course, but as science developed and fossil fuels were available, population growth these last 150 years is proof humanity did a ‘good’ job of ‘dominating’ nature, generally speaking. What would Malthus say if he saw all seven billion of us now?

What this system has not delivered, is precisely that escape from the Enemy Wild we thought we sought. Today we can look on jealously at ‘primitives’ seemingly at one with their environment, enjoying an easy leisure we can only dream of, a peace of mind which remains out of reach, even on expensive holidays in the sun, even in clean, gated communities protected by armed guards. We brought the wild with us, built concrete jungles every bit as uncontrollable as the ‘unclean’ jungles we fled. There was no separation after all. We are beasts too (which is no bad thing). Still we scrabble towards an illusory ‘top,’ in blind pursuit of something we left behind, pursuing it because we don’t see it right there, under our noses, where it always was.

And yet, that we increasingly see our manic system as unsustainable—though a sign of hope perhaps—is not (yet) as important as our general inability to see reality as a whole in which we are embedded, at a sufficiently deep and broad scale to bring about lasting change. But this too is changing. We are becoming one. To be cute, I’d say we’re becoming an Updated One. Differentiation and spicy variety included.

Positive interest and its development was pretty clever, considering the times. You have a money supply that is generated by and responsive to economic activity (or the promise of it), which can only be an amount too little to cover what’s owed, whereby competition is ensured. The money supply is fine-tunable via various mechanisms; credit-money destruction upon debt repayment, recycling the interest earned back into the system, and encouraging further economic activity with further loans, always keeping things scarce, always encouraging entrepreneurship and inventiveness. What’s not to like? Look at the nature of the challenges the money-system addresses. We have extreme specialization already baked into our cultural and socioeconomic DNA, inevitable hierarchy as a direct consequence thereof, social complexity beyond human comprehension, and a need to keep as many people as possible ‘provably’ useful to society to prevent pointless and bloody revolution. To meet these challenges, we have high powered and credit money in a positive interest-bearing debt system using expunging, default, bonds and taxation as tools to drain money from the economy; private sector credit-extension, and public sector government borrowing, to inject money into the economy; the separation of powers (or the notion thereof, which has its potency even in today’s advanced stage of corruption and breakdown); waged labour; and representative democracy. If we accept that nothing’s perfect, we have to agree it’s a pretty good system, surely? Could you organize a country or planet any better? Could I? Can we? I’m not talking about talking the talk, but walking the walk.

Peter Joseph criticizes consumerism for being cyclical. But so’s nature. Our money system is prone to collapse, but look at forest fires. Great swathes of people are poor, but who really believes life is fair? We’re consuming resources too fast, but so do locusts (fascinating creatures by the way). They suffer population collapse, then start up again when conditions permit. What’s wrong with that? What if human population collapses to about 2 billion and we start the game again? Would that be bad? Why are humans more important to Universe than locusts? Do we have a special destiny? Must we survive? Must there be seven billion of us, or two, or twenty?

Such questions are unhelpful, for the most part. We cannot not want to survive, and we are special, just as are locusts, just as is grass, simply because we can perceive specialness. That ability has evolved in us. As we are of Universe, all we do is of Universe. We ask philosophical questions, we muse, we care, we care not, we struggle to overcome with inventiveness, can imagine the future, want the best for our children’s children, and ‘know’ we want the best. This is our nature, our nurture. There are alternatives.

Dinosaurs died out, furry little mammals didn’t. In time, the furry mammals evolved into apes, now there’s homo sapiens sapiens. Change is the only constant. Change is nature, Universe. And now we say we love life. We know joy. We believe deeply still in a bunch of stuff that is the dying paradigm, but that’s changing. In competing to maximize self-interest, we have rendered ourselves virtually economically redundant, but why should the economy be the only thing that matters? That’s an addressable challenge, because value is no absolute and is very poorly measured with a linear scale like $ or €. We can learn to do ‘better,’ are learning to do ‘better.’ We know burning through fossil fuels to power our creature comforts is highly unsustainable. We are concerned with fairness and justice, suffer when confronted with ongoing and obvious injustice. But we do not want a grey, featureless future of conformity and uniformity. We want to spread joy, live rich, meaningful lives, even if most today are very narcissistic and immature in that endeavour. And it is for simple reasons like wanting to live and loving joy that I put my shoulder to this wheel and push.

And then there is the panda. Billions of cells working in harmony to be a cute animal which has a very hard time turning out new pandas, and is very fussy about it’s food. It is at the edge of its time on earth, kept alive by human intervention. Changing the ‘flawed’ wisdom of the panda, a wisdom it acquired over millions of years of evolution, is hard. Getting it to like a wider variety of food stuffs, or be more fertile and prolific, isn’t easy. All those cells evolved to operate in a particular way. The cells of human society are held together by a paradigm, by beliefs, which evolved over many millennia to become the corpus of structures that make up society today, the ideas, the mores, the expectations. And while it’s easier to change a paradigm than a panda, it certainly isn’t a snap. But the more important message of this comparison is not the relative difficulty, but the absence of a victim, the absence of evil doers. Whom should we blame for the panda’s fate? For humanity’s? ‘Blame’ is a perception-filter we created, but maybe soon we won’t need that filter any more. It’s complex out there. Things evolve, cope, adapt, as they happen to, not as our short-sighted egos desire, from nucleated cells to fissiparous human societies, fractious, avaricious, creative, destructive, evolving.

I am not writing this in a vacuum. The ideas I draw on have been available to humanity for thousands of years. We could call them our genetic social potential, a vein of fertility we have not quite learned to tap. Whether we do or not is up to the gods, up to us, up to chance. Whether we do or not is neither good nor bad. Shit just happens, and nothing can stop that.

Partly because I believe in progress—not that progress is Good or Bad, but that wisdom accumulates and humans now cast value judgments upon those accumulations—I also believe the momentum is sufficiently in the direction of ‘improvement’ to be ‘hopeful’ about coming decades. Species go extinct, and humans might too. But I don’t think so. Universe evolved this way, is finding more exquisite expressions of interbeing as it goes, and we are in that, of that. The appreciation of Universal complexity I have learned these last years is a gift given I share with others. The experiences of joy discovery unleashes, life unleashes, in and amongst the horrors, are gifts we share. Without sharing—sharing too is a gift—, even in the form of competitive enmity, there can be nothing. Without interbeing, nothing can be. We are. This core and simple reality, as it dovetails with change and evolution, is why I am excited about this period. It’s not that the old is Bad and the new Good, or vice versa, but that we can be involved, and can enjoy the struggle of that involvement.

Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft’ is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

On Equality

2012-01-05T23:20:00.000-08:00

In recent months I’ve been giving the word ‘equality’ a hard time. I’m taking a closer look at it here today, since it’s central to our sense of what’s morally right and wrong. When we think of fairness, equality is never far from our thoughts. Why?

The standard literature on this topic distinguishes between equality and diversity, asserting the two notions are not mutually exclusive:

Equality is about ‘creating a fairer society, where everyone can participate and has the opportunity to fulfil their potential’ (DoH, 2004).
[...snip...]
Diversity literally means difference. When it is used as a contrast or addition to equality, it is about recognising individual as well as group differences, treating people as individuals, and placing positive value on diversity in the community and in the workforce.
Source

Equality means treating people in a way that is appropriate for their needs. For example, if Michael Flanders wanted to board the plane, it would be no good saying to him, “you have the same stairs as everybody else”. What is needed is a way of getting on the plane that will suit everybody’s needs without showing them up and treating them in a way that is worse than other people.
Source

Equality is all about making sure everyone is treated fairly and given the same life opportunities. It is not about treating everyone the same as they may have different needs to achieve the same outcomes.
Diversity is about recognising and valuing individual differences and raising awareness about them.
Source

And so on. Is this a sound argument? Or perhaps, asked in a better way, is this a constructive position to hold?

In “The Spirit Level” authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett present reams of data which show, very clearly, that all sorts of measures, from inventiveness to mental health to crime, tend to suffer in countries which have wide income gaps; where income distribution is grossly unequal. And as I have cited here before, recent science suggests the human brain is ‘wired’ for fairness. So, for the moment, equating equality with fairness seems, well, fair enough, at least at the level of income (though I’ll conclude this post with two quotes from “The Spirit Level” which expand on this, and demonstrate just how important fairness is to us). More importantly perhaps, it is plain that fairness is simply a big deal to homo sapiens sapiens. For example, as parents we know our children are different, but we try to treat them equally, or fairly.

But fair to whom, and how? To absolutely everyone and everything on the planet, equally? If we take the example of a man in a wheelchair told to use the stairs to board a plane because everyone else does, it seems obvious such handling of that man’s needs is discriminatory. But is airline travel fair from the environment’s point of view? And what is a fair amount of luggage? If rich people are accustomed to traveling with 100 pounds of luggage per person, should the poor pay for this ‘need’ by being allowed less luggage allowance, so that the plane can take off safely, with as many passengers on board as possible, so that the airline can make a ‘fair’ profit? Or am I being unnecessarily awkward?

If we don’t contemplate the practical implications of implementing an idea, we are not confronting the devilish detail. For when we seek equal opportunities, no matter how well we argue our case philosophically, or poetically, we have to translate our words into actions, make them ‘real.’ It is when we start to do this that complexity breaks in. Always have a plan, a backup plan, and a backup for that backup (if time permits!), but the more people we try to please, the less likely it is we can stick to any plan, no matter how well thought through, and the less likely it is that everyone will think the implementation of that plan fair. If we can’t please all the people all the time, can we really hope for a system which delivers truly equal opportunities to absolutely everyone? I don’t think we can, but what sort of a ‘problem’ is this?

Recognising we can’t please all the people all the time, we recognise too that muddling through is all we’ve got. This applies to equal opportunities as it applies to capitalism, schooling, factory work, civil engineering, and so on. It’s complex out there. All sorts of ‘random’ stuff happens that throws spanners in cogs every minute of every day in an endless variety of ways. Yesterday my daughter bought the wrong type of monthly train ticket, which meant my wife and I having to buy the correct one that evening for her next journey to school, then driving to the nearest BVG office (in Steglitz) next morning, to hand in the incorrect ticket for a refund. Steglitz is enjoying a spate of roadworks at the moment, and too many cars have to drive through the borough anyway, so there was lots of traffic, honking of horns, screeching wheels and angry drivers. I would not have wanted to be headed for a meeting. Maybe someone was, was very late, and lost their job through no ‘fault’ of their own. Shit happens. It doesn’t matter how much we want equal opportunities, nor how good our institutions and laws and other systems ‘ensuring’ them are; life’s complexity gets in the way. Equal opportunities can be desired and aimed for, but never delivered. We muddle through.

Even when it comes to something as ‘simple’ as getting everyone who wants to fly onto an airplane, what would this require in practice (I’m not even going to look at purchasing power or environmental health)? What about mentally handicapped people on long flights, screaming, groaning, etc? Even a screaming baby can make a twelve hour flight an ordeal for some passengers. My own daughter, under two years old, screamed non-stop for about six hours when we drove to Toronto from New Jersey. The only thing that would have appeased her would have been to not make that journey. Had we been on an airplane it would have been an even worse experience. How about obese people who don’t fit into economy-sized seats, which are narrow so that poorer passengers can afford the tickets? Should poor obese people pay more? Should we be charged by our size? Should we insist on less obesity? If yes, how? These are irritating questions, but when we strive for fairness, they are exactly the kinds of issues we are confronted with. As David Graeber points out, one person’s rights are another person’s obligations. The right to free speech requires sometimes being obliged to ‘endure’ speech we passionately disagree with. In practice, democracy means sometimes having to go along with things we dislike, maybe deeply.

There can be no lasting balance (change is the only constant), but, seeing as fairness (whatever that really is) is obviously a big deal for us humans, tending towards more fairness is ‘better’ for humans than tending away from it (see “The Spirit Level” for evidence). But again, within which system? Representative democracy? Direct democracy? Technocracy? A resourced-based economy? And how do we test, or experiment with, whole, living societies? We can’t, and yet when you think about it, that’s all we’re ever doing. No one really knows.

When it comes to a fairer society, we are wise to remember that if getting all people who want it on airplanes is difficult, getting all of society to cooperate with our ideas of how it should be is orders of magnitude more so. For naïve idealists like me, contemplating the devilish details is therefore very healthy. While we might indeed celebrate diversity and fight for ‘equality’ without being too conflicted, it is complexity—not diversity in the sense suggested by the above quotes (though diversity and complexity are obviously profoundly related)—which makes the latter so damned elusive. I dimly recall Jacque Fresco saying that the more justice you seek, the more disappointed you’ll be. What happens is what happens, not what ought to. We don’t get to control that. Winds blow down trees crushing families in cars, and that’s that. We are then tasked with dealing with it. Humans flip out, fail, fight wars when negotiation might have been wiser, compromise when proud defiance might have been wiser, and so on. Tragedy will always be with us, and we deal with each horror and upset as we do, not as we ought. And like I say, we are as much a part of nature as weather, and ‘control’—both of self and not-self—is as much an idea as fairness. I’m quite sure we understand neither control nor fairness. As absolutes I’m convinced they don’t ‘exist,’ but as sufficiencies we tend towards and are guided by, I’m equally convinced they are powerful ideas indeed.

As we slowly reorient ourselves into a new relationship with opposites, with Cartesian Dualism and binary thinking, we also, by extension, ‘redesign’ (or re-define) society. As biosocial pressures such as technological unemployment and the end of growth work on us, change how we think, force us from our addictive comfort zones, so we will come to muddle through in new ways, develop new relationships with what is permissible, valuable, acceptable. Part of this, I predict, will be more globalization (internet-, not corporate-based I hope), part will be re-localization. Whatever emerges in coming decades, it will be the highly complex adaptions and reactions to the consequences of the biosocial pressures I just mentioned (and others of course), reactions to those reactions, and so on, that nudge and shuffle us, jointly and separately, wherever it is our jostling, arguing, competing, cooperating and doing take us. And while we cannot know in advance any ‘final’ detail, nor can there be an ‘outcome,’ I feel confident that more appeals to fairness—more intelligent and wiser attempts at fairer systems and institutions—will be both required and desired, despite and in the face of life’s complexity. It’s been this way since forever, of course. What makes me put fingers to keyboard is the depth of the changes required, and the global nature of the challenge. My reading is that both are unprecedented in scale and implication. If we do well, there’s no telling what new wonders we might create. If we fail to adapt wisely, we might well go the way of the dodo, and at least civilization is threatened. But such is true for all species confronted with fundamentally existential challenges. No living system has any special right to survive forever. All are generated and sustained (or crushed) by the momentum they co-evolve alongside and within, generating change as they adapt, or fail to adapt, to change.

Finally, those two promised quotes from “The Spirit Level”:

In 2004, World Bank economists Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey reported the results of a remarkable experiment. They took 321 high-caste and 321 low-caste 11 to 12 years old boys from scattered rural villages in India, and set them the task of solving mazes. First, the boys did the puzzles without being aware of each other's caste. Under this condition the low-caste boys did just as well with the mazes as the high-caste boys, indeed slightly better.
Then, the experiment was repeated, but this time each boy was asked to confirm an announcement of his name, village, father’s and grandfather’s name, and caste. After this public announcement of caste, the boys did more mazes, and this time there was a large caste gap in how well they did—the performance of the low-caste boys dropped significantly.
[...snip...]
Jane Elliot, an American schoolteacher, conducted an experiment with her students in 1968, in an effort to teach them about racial inequality and injustice. She told them that scientists had shown that people with blue eyes were more intelligent and more likely to succeed than people with brown eyes, who were lazy and stupid. She divided her class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups, and gave the blue-eyed group extra privileges, praise and attention. The blue-eyed group quickly asserted its superiority over the brown-eyed children, treating them contemptuously, and the school performance improved. The brown-eyed group just as quickly adopted a submissive timidity, and their marks declined. After a few days, Elliot told the children had got the information mixed up and that actually it was brown eyes that indicated superiority. The classroom situation rapidly reversed.

In conclusion, I’d say human nature, that hoary old chestnut, as it emerges from and grows through its supporting environments—social and ecological (to separate for argument what is not separate)—means we cannot help but want, on the whole and over time, equality as is relates to fairness. That’s out of our control. This has been true of us since hunter gatherer times, and remains true today. Simple things like shunning and conformity are powerful evidence of this drive, which Jeremy Rifkin calls the drive to belong. Equally, we can never deliver truly equal opportunities or societal fairness because life is simply too complex, and control of all variables to ensure or fix in place desired outcomes is flat out impossible. And while morality is important to me, it is not moral considerations which motivate my thinking, but rather pragmatic (that from a confessed idealist who believes matter is what we can see of spirit!). Equally (to overuse that beat upon word), it is not neatness or squeaky clean cities and societies I seek (mess is beautiful), but wise-as-possible adaptions to change. Maturity, if you like. A tall order for sure, but them’s the breaks.

The New Care Bears?

2012-01-05T01:11:00.001-08:00

I found this today and think it is an absolutely excellent cartoon. If that don't say it all, I don't know what does.

Technology, Growth and Employment

2012-01-04T01:31:00.000-08:00

This post puts me back in old territory after a long journey through inner landscapes, prompted in part by my own personal transformation—which is unending of course—as well as the Occupy movement, which is, for me, part of The Venus Project, The Zeitgeist Movement and all other attempts to self-educate, together, into the new; to make sense for ourselves of where we are, and of the nature of the challenges we face. And although economic matters such as money and labour prompt us to ask the deeper questions, it will soon prove to be a transformation of consciousness—which is anyway ongoing and perpetual—, value, and meaning we are wrestling with. Key battlegrounds are selfishness-altruism, competition-cooperation, rights-obligations, scarcity-abundance, work-pleasure, waste-food, and more broadly that dichotomies themselves are illusions, scales, perception-filters with which we have co-evolved, learned, grown wiser. It is my sense that we are now coming to experience dichotomies as embedded ‘tools,’ as interwoven through our reality as life and as subtle as language, rather than as insoluble Platonic absolutes. All institutions and their driving ideologies are thus on the table; everything is caught up in this transformation. We are tasked with doing good work, both for and in ourselves, and for and in the network which enables us—where “both” suggests a separation not there.

That broad backdrop denoted, it is appropriate to zero in on, anew, a topic which is now finding more column inches in the mainstream than previously; technological unemployment. I’ve written on this before, but that was then, and this is now. Today I begin by pointing out that employment itself is a technology. Exchanging labour and time for a wage is new in human history, particularly as fused with self-worth and ‘independence.’ Typically we do not penetrate that concept, that how we value ourselves is reflexively, autonomically associated with our ‘job’ or ‘career.’ We tend to leave that association unexamined (though I ought to point out that introspection itself is also a new phenomenon; the word ‘self-conscious’ didn’t appear until 1690). However, feeling that we have a place, are somehow contributing to the network which sustains us, is a ‘deep’ urge arising from being a social animal capable of abstract language. This urge is present in humans of hunter gatherer groups to city metropolises. That combination—social + abstract language—makes homo sapiens sapiens myth- and symbol-based creatures. We exist in language, as Fritjof Capra stated. Language is a landscape, a repository of accumulated wisdom we are steered by when we understand, communicate, learn, do. ‘Technological unemployment’ is an expression with a rich history and layered symbology, bound up in value, identity, utility, Cartesian Dualism (nature-nurture). Its shifting meaning to us is as important as the ‘problem’ it has perceived into existence.

What is the problem it identifies, exactly? There are many answers, what follows is mine.

Systemically, socioeconomically, we equip consumers with purchasing power via the labour each worker exchanges for money. Money has purchasing power enabling those holding it to take ‘ownership’ of the goods and services their and other workers’ labour has helped to produce. Jobs and careers (in the contemporary sense) are ‘inventions’ for allotting or distributing (via wages) symbols of value which also have the power to affect exchange. We get purchasing power—a vital component to the spiraling cyclicality of consumerism—via wages. The fewer people equipped with lasting purchasing power the fewer consumers there are. This is of course a big and ongoing problem in a growth-based system.

The human realm in which this cyclical distribution takes place is called ‘the economy,’ which, quite by chance it seems, must grow, or spiral outwards, forever. The surface reason for this is to be found in the design of the usury-based money system; the deeper reason we have a usury-based money system in the first place lies in our sense of ourselves as Masters of Nature, the Good Ones, Separate, growing and conquering the Idle Resources of the Wild. We have been multiplying, battling Enemy Nature all the way, fulfilling our Destiny of Ascent. But now, as Charles Eisenstein points out, our once unshakable belief in our Dominion is crumbling. Hold that thought.

Parallel with our briefly explained system of value-distribution, we have increasing ‘efficiency’ and ‘competition.’ In the allegedly hot melee which is evolution we have ‘technological advances.’ Change is nature, nature is ongoing accrual of wisdom, we are of nature, nature is a ‘technological’ process we are embedded in (“technological” meaning the perceiving and ‘solving’ of ‘problems’). Change is the only constant. In my view there is nothing ‘unnatural’ about computers and robots. There is nothing ‘better’ about the past than the present or future, other than what we perceive, imagine. Efficiency and competition are, in part, doing economically better than the Other; producers strive to deliver goods and services for sale to consumers at lower costs so as to increase profits, get their hands on more purchasing power, and enjoy life more. Part of this has been automation, which is millennia old, including tamed fire, store, pickling, pulleys and anything else which Makes Life Easier. But as we Make Life Easier we shrink—after some juncture, slowly and fitfully at first but now very obviously—the economic usefulness of human labour, on balance and over time. As Andrew McAfee recently pointed out, “The list of things humans are demonstrably better at than computers is shrinking pretty dramatically.” We humans are less and less necessary to economic production, and yet we are still socially, 'humanly' important to each other. “Humans need humans.”

So it comes down to value; how to value each other, how to reward, punish, share our ingenuity. What is value? Whence does it arise? Should we ‘measure’ it? If so, then how? If strangers exchange smiles on a bus should they then use a smart phone application for measuring smile effectiveness, then bill each other accordingly—since both strangers derived ‘value’ from the exchange—to keep the ‘economy’ going? What of the wide gamut of human activity should we include in the economic realm, should we call labour, should earn money? If humans become economically redundant, should we commit mass suicide because we have thus become useless? How dominant in terms of power and decision making should the economic realm be? How unquestioningly should we idolize it? Youth unemployment in Greece is 45%, 49% in Spain. In the States, the labour participation rate is at 64%, close to how it is was during the Great Depression. The Great Depression. Useless people everywhere, starving because they were useless, are useless. Meanwhile, I hear factory production is at around 40% capacity across the planet, but we don’t need more humans to produce more, we need them to buy more. Why? To appease Perpetual Growth. We don’t need to buy more, Perpetual Growth does. How ‘useless’ have we become? Where is our vaunted imagination?

As our unshakable faith in our Manifest Destiny crumbles, as we tire of consumerism, no longer want more and more; as population growth slows, to zero and less in some western lands; as our ingenuity and restlessness render us economically redundant, every pillar that supports the usury- and growth-based system cracks more deeply, loses strength. Without Growth, we have Recession or Depression. That these concepts stand in opposition to each other tells its own story. That we can converse about greed, about consuming too much, about a simpler life, yet still demand jobs, decent wages, a Return to Normal, tells another. But more and more of us are seeing through the veil, experimenting with different ideas, perceptions. The Story of Ascent unravels as we peer through its mists, and as we peer, we seek and we probe, adding fuel to the process of creating the New, which is gathering strength. The energy we want to contribute to Ascent is shrinking, thus the Old is deflating. The New is gaining strength as a direct consequence of this, struggling to its feet, getting ready to walk, becoming more visible, more charismatic, clearer. And nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Technological unemployment will remain a ‘problem’ while we too tightly and rigidly associate utility with job and career, while we distribute purchasing power (value) via labour, while we measure value exclusively via market processes and call only its result True Value, while we insist ownership of property in larger amounts is what life is about, and while we battle to sustain our usury-based money system. Because the old associations are so deep, the direction which is taking us away from them appears to lead nowhere, for now. But it’s always like that. You could make a good case that Rome’s collapse was in part due to ‘technological’ unemployment: “In AD 28 there were three million slaves and four million people in Italy.” (Rifkin, “The Empathic Civilization”, p229.) Systemically, machines and slaves are producers we don’t pay, we don’t furnish with purchasing power. In this system, that is a problem.

But what the ‘goal’ might look like is not the issue at this stage, nor any stage. Is there agreement on the goal of the current paradigm? The journey is the destination. There is no ending, no Final State, no perfection. Everything is always emerging, changing, learning. As we probe, question, create new interpretations and ideas, so we imagine different ways of being, cut new paths. Imagination, folks, imagination! Isn’t that the source of value? Drink of its spring, do not be too afraid, be open to change. Isn’t that what the challenge of crisis demands?

It's Complex Out There

2011-12-30T05:59:00.000-08:00

The older I get and the more I study, the more people I exchange ideas with, here and elsewhere, the harder I find it to see clear objectives. Indeed, the process is akin to seeing a once clear objective evaporate. All I am left with is participation and contribution, and both are muddy. It is not that there is no bad deed to battle, no soured system to turn to some ‘higher’ purpose or ‘functioning,’ it is rather that the ‘steps’ and ‘decisions’ to be taken appear more and more arbitrary to me. It is as if all that matters is our wisdom, our consciousness, and our broadest intent, not so much the details of the System du Jour we find ourselves in. And further, that even these vague caveats be qualified by a ‘what will be will be’ philosophy.

Perhaps some quotes from two Pixar films will help explain my ‘position.’ The first is a pivotal scene from “A Bug’s Life”, in which the leader of the bad guys (bad grasshoppers, actually), Hopper, gives a motivational talk to his troops, who kinda sorta wanna chill, quaff beer, and pork out on snacks in the delicious Mexican sun, not go out of their way to Do The Right Thing and quash an ‘upstart’ member of the ant colony they tyrannize to sustain their way of life.

Hopper: But, there was that ant that stood up to me...

Thug 1: Yeah, but we can forget about him!

Thug 2: Yeah ... it was just one ant.

Hopper: You’re right! It’s just one ant.

Thug 2: Yeah, boss! They’re puny!

Hopper: Puny? Say, let’s say this grain is a puny little ant. [Pulls a seed-grain from a jerry-rigged liquor bottle behind the ‘bar’ and throws it at Thug 2. Grain bounces harmlessly off grasshopper’s exoskeleton.] Did that hurt?

Thug 2: Nope.

Hopper: [Takes another grain from the bottle.] How ‘bout this one. [Throws grain at Thug 1.]

Thug 1: Are you kiddin’! [Chorus of thugs laughs uproariously.]

Hopper: How about THIS! [Rips ‘grain dispenser’ from the bottleneck to let thousands of grains flood out, overwhelming the assembled thugs.] You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up. Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one! And if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life! It’s not about food, it’s about keeping those ants in line. That’s why we’re going back! Does anybody else wanna stay? [Entire group dutifully ‘activates’ its wings as one, ready to ride off and do their duty.]

I’m not interesting in discussing the 99% analogies that leap off the page here. I'm getting at something else. In my mind the grasshopper character “Hopper” is named after Dennis Hopper, an actor gifted at playing spooky bad guys. I mention this because it links us to a film which presents free riding ‘cool’ dudes in a very different light; “Easy Rider”. In “A Bug’s Life”, it is, in a sense, the bourgeois collective (the ants) who are the Good Guys, while the free riding fun lovers are assigned the antagonist’s role. In “Easy Rider” it is the other way around; the bourgeois collective must be rebelled against, escaped, as its cloying grasp limits freedom and smothers creativity. Furthermore, I can easily imagine a Pixar cartoon in which ants were characterless, rapacious drones, and grasshoppers sensitive, musical troubadours with poet souls yearning to create their most beautiful songs. ‘Evil’ is that which challenges us to leave our comfort zone behind, to move ‘beyond’ our current state to something ‘higher’ or ‘wiser.’ Evil is not intrinsic to one mode of life or another. Antagonism is inevitable in a reality which is complex and multifaceted. How we deal with antagonism is, in a limited way, up to us. ‘Evil’ creates the space in which progress can happen.

Good or Evil? The versatile Dennis Hopper challenges us in all his roles.

The next scene comes from “Ratatouille”, one of my favourite films. In this scene the pragmatic Rat Dad tries to show his idealistic son (Remy) the harsh realities of rat life. Dad takes son to see a store selling traps and poisons for killing rodents. The window display is gruesome for a rat; tens of dead rats hanging by their necks from various implements of death.

Dad: We’re here. [ It’s dark, but two flashes of lightning illuminate the rat corpses.] Take a good, long look, Remy. This is what happens when a rat gets a little too comfortable around humans. The world we live in belongs to the enemy. We must live carefully. We look out for our own kind, Remy! When all is said and done, we’re all we’ve got. [Walks off, thinking the lesson is over. Remy stays put.]

Remy: No.

Dad: What?

Remy: No! Dad, I don’t believe it. You’re telling me that the future is ... can only be, more of THIS!? [Points at rat corpses.]

Dad: This is the way things are. You can’t change nature.

Remy: Change is nature, Dad! The part that we can influence. And it starts when we decide.

“Ratatouille” is a better and subtler film than “A Bug’s Life” (in my opinion). It’s as if the two films represent two statements on the same problem, the earlier film taking a standard position (the ‘bad’ guy is defeated), whereas in “Ratatouille” the threat is transformed into a creative partnership. The later film deftly wields multiple antagonists, but the main ‘bad’ guy literally becomes the hero’s business partner. (I hope that’s not giving away too much for those who have not seen this wonderful film.) And for me this is what antagonism (‘evil’) is about; change. We either manage change creatively, or we don’t (though I’m loathe to present a binary!). And of course when we manage change creatively, we set up some ‘better’ situation which itself is antagonistic to some other system. A life without challenge cannot create anything new, cannot evolve. And in that melee, we each perceive (experience) comfort and discomfort, pleasure and pain, in greatly varying degrees.

I am on holiday in Italy with my own family of four, my sister-in-law’s family, and my parents-in-law. Aside from my good self, everyone here loves Christmas, loves the toys, the gifts, the abundance, the drinking, the hedonism and indulgence. Lip-service is paid to ‘being together,’ but every day is about consumption, shopping, spending. And if not that, watching TV. The young ones play computer games. On (what is for me) the plus side, there’s been a fair bit of scrabble, and my elder daughter’s gifts were her own creations for the main part. One was even a piano piece she discovered online and learned with great self-discipline, then played to her aunt. And it is here my duality is highly visible to me (and you I’m sure). At Econosophy I write about deep societal change, less is more, transition to a resource-based economy. Here in Mirano I mention no such thing, stand on no soap box, seize no opportunity to berate my fellow revelers for their ‘mindless’ consumption. I am middle class, so would not enjoy the subsequent tensions, but deeper than that I realize we all walk different paths. There is no such thing as equality, except in the abstract world of mathematics and scientific measurement. There is no pure, clean path we must tread as one, loyally follow to reach one single destination, a city shining on a high hill, best for all, the best that humanity can achieve. Though I am romantic and idealistic, I know deeply such visions are exactly as ‘evil’ and divisive as that which I see as ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ in the world ‘out there.’ There is not one tune we should march in lockstep to which can possibly be good. Mess is beauty. Mess is mucky. Celebrate that.

And my duality (or hypocrisy) runs deeper than that rendering. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with enjoying Christmas in all its consumerist glory, with singing the Santa Claus-Coca Cola, Good Child-Bad Child song; with playing along with the ‘crowd,’ going with the flow. We are all of us socialized by the ongoing dance of our biology and the events we pass through. For thousands of reasons I become what I become, perceive as I perceive, desire, fear, hope as Toby Russell does. Pride of ‘accomplishment’ is misplaced, totally egotistical. I am the flow of my life, as are you of yours. That I go ‘against’ the mainstream is neither here nor there. If doom-based predictions are right, if our ‘greed’ were to cause civilizational collapse, would that be more or less ‘evil’ than a meteor wiping out life on earth? Or the sun exploding?

And yet none of this moral relativism detracts from my passion to fight for what I see as a ‘better’ system. I still love humanity, life on earth, Universe. Such feelings are expressions of what I am becoming, but have next to nothing to do with what I can ‘control.’ What these tendrils binding me to the mainstream do is humble me. Though I get angry at injustice and short sighted profligacy, perfection is not only an impossibility, striving for it is almost cruel. While I do not want short sighted profligacy to wipe us out, it is not because such would be ‘evil,’ but simply because I do not want that outcome. Fighting for what I want does not mean accusing others of being less Good than I am oh so nobly struggling to be. Such is not only counter-productive, it is short sighted. No one can be handed wisdom by me (however well written or reasoned); there exists no finished ‘wisdom’ that can be handed over. Each of us develops our own, unique wisdom; art is communicating it, sharing it. I would go so far as to say that is what living is, for amoebas, coral reefs, forests, herrings, hedgehogs and humans alike. And all together as Universe too, for life is not a separate or alien phenomenon, weirdly and inexplicably around for a moment until the ‘natural’ pitilessness of Universe can carry on as it was before. Life is as inextricably Universe as ‘barren’ rock drifting the depths of space, or as nuclear forces. And I say that knowing we do not yet understand anything, life most of all perhaps, not to mention time and gravity. So while I do get angry, and shout at Those Idiots, such does not help that fight which has chosen me; it just gets in the way, slows me down.

We are our own worst enemies. But without that defect, could we do anything at all? What would we be without our ‘enemy’ within? And thus, in my round-about way, I get to thank you, dear readers, for keeping me grounded, challenging me, offering me your wisdom in your art, and helping me change creatively, even if it hurts sometimes. And thank you too to those who don’t resonate with my art, who walk very different paths. Whatever we do choose and create, we’re in this together, in ways both great and small, intimate and remote. We would wither to dried flotsam were antagonism not in our midst. We get to try and enjoy it while it lasts.

Peace, pain, change and a good life to all!

Our Augean Stables

2011-12-18T00:33:00.000-08:00

Augeas, King of Elis, was proud owner of one thousand divine cattle, all housed in vast stables that hadn’t been cleaned in thirty years. No one knows the exact tonnage of dung those beasts had produced in that time, but it didn’t bother Augeas; the cattle were divine and hence could not get sick. He was a very proud and ensconced king of Elis. Until, one day, a famous hero visited him, and took a shine to his beautiful heifers.

Heracles wanted one hundred of Augeas’ cattle, so offered to clean their stables in one day. Augeas, convinced the task was totally impossible, accepted the offer, not knowing Heracles had a cunning plan; rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus. Heracles ripped a hole in two of the stables’ walls, dug a trench through the stables and to the rivers, rerouted their waters and washed the dung away. Augeas was royally miffed, more so when he discovered Eurystheus had set his heroic opponent this task as one of the famous Twelve Labours (Eurystheus was Hera’s choice in a battle she fought against Zeus, who had chosen Heracles to be his hero—even heroes are pawns to the gods). Augeas refused to pay up, so Heracles, as one might expect, killed him.

Heracles battles the Hydra

Out with the old, in with the new. But of course there is plenty to this myth which is appropriate to all sorts of situations. Zeus and Hera had set Heracles and Eurystheus in hot contest with one another, to determine which of the two would earn the honour of being the hero fated to usher in the long reign of the Twelve Olympians. The victorious hero would kill off the old guard, the old beasts still holding power on earth. So not only are the stables cleansed of accumulated junk in this part of the tale, the deed itself was a task set by an aspiring hero chosen by an ambitious goddess hungry for the honour of backing the right man in fulfilling a long prophesied destiny. What screams out at me in all this is adversarial competition, opposites struggling against one another, producing change and, to some eyes, ‘progress.’ A kind of Hegelian dialectic; thesis and antithesis yielding a higher truth, a synthesis, a ‘progression’ to something new. Competition breeding cooperation, or cooperation as an overarching ‘outcome’ of competition. I think this is how we see reality for thousands of years, as a battle of opposites. While we do, reality ‘complies’ by showing us that of its ‘selves’ our presumptions selectively reveal. This isn’t solipsistic, more of a multi-trillion node tango of infinite counter-influences and caused causes.

At a narrower angle there is the theme of unattended business, or procrastination, perhaps hubris. Because Augeas’ cattle are divine, he can ignore their waste. But the countryside is not divine. While the cattle can remain healthy forever, Augeas’ casual confidence is a threat to the future; the stables are not infinitely big, must overflow at some point, by which time perhaps even a hero of Heracles’ stature wouldn’t be up to the task. The parallel to our modern situation is obvious. Human Progress (now enshrined in GDP Growth) is divine, must go on forever, should go on forever, because it is inherently Good and Right, no matter the finite nature of the environment supporting our ‘ascent.’ We can sustain belief in infinite growth while our stables hold, but if we wait too long, our effluent will overpower the supporting environment and we will be washed away by the resulting collapse.

And yet manure, as we all know, is fertilizer. It is only a problem if used incorrectly, in this case left to accumulate in one spot. And here another parallel emerges; hoarding and desert. Being usury-based, our money system encourages hoarding. Being elitist-based our broader, hierarchical system assigns the largest rewards to those most ‘deserving’ of them. We ‘decide’ who is most deserving of the largest slices of the pie via the so-called ‘free’ market. Because we Just Know this ‘free’ market ‘impartially’ distributes money rewards to the most ‘deserving,’ it necessarily produces, over the long term, the best possible outcomes for all, as long as there is no interference (an obvious impossibility). What we actually experience is stubbornly growing rich and poor divides (hoarding), with the rich fearfully defending their cash cows, because they, as if by divine right, ‘deserve’ them, Market says so; Market says they are kings all. We must not ‘punish’ success, hence things stay as they are, rich-poor divides and all. Muck accumulates, being muck precisely because it accumulates. Sadly, the deeper aspects of what it is to ‘deserve’ a reward are not explored in the mainstream. One of them is of course free will, a concept at least very difficult, if not, then probably impossible to prove, and that’s before we even look at the impossibility of ‘equal’ opportunities.

Daniel Pinchbeck, author, journalist, and writer of the film “2012, Time for Change” describes money as fertilizer, perhaps as a new twist on ‘stinking rich.’ We should put (invest) money there where it will yield the healthiest returns. What “healthy returns” might be needs to be discussed. As readers of this blog know, I am not for mindless consumerism, and support strongly any redesign of the money system which encourages gift giving, stronger community, ‘individual’ health and societal health (i.e., low crime, high ‘freedom’ to live life as creatively and generously as possible), open education systems, maximum political and emotional maturity for all, a prevention-based not cure-based health system, renewable energies, etc. One part of achieving this would be to keep money flowing, to prevent hoarding. I suspect one part of that is losing the casual confidence of King Augeas in believing in our divine right, that simply because we are human, we deserve to multiply infinitely upon the face of the earth, then out into space, forever. I expect a far richer and maturer confidence would emerge if we managed this new humility, and not the barren and system-rescuing ‘austerity’ parroted by the financial industry, and their two stooges the mainstream media and political actors.

On a personal level, we all have our own Augean Stables. In a small way, Econosophy is a place where I share some of my negativity with anyone who cares to comment (I too like to bitch and moan). I am here, at a late stage in my life, growing up in public. There are articles I posted here which embarrass me now, but I will not delete them. I noticed a line I had written of which I am now deeply ashamed; “Bankers are the scum of the earth.” I leave all that crap out there to remind myself how I have progressed through this learning arc I was set on by Peter Joseph’s “Zeitgeist: Addendum”, and to try and teach myself patience with others, and with myself. None of us is perfect. I ‘fail’ again and again. But better to have out with it than let it fester in some dark corner, convinced the Bright Toby, the bits of me I’m proud of, are immortal, divine, forever robust and healthy, unaffected by the dark. There is no separation, no matter how clearly we think we can see it. Dark and light are matters of perception, each suggesting the other, each meaningful in a vast and seamless web we call Universe. And it is beautiful.

So the opposites we perceive are not necessarily opposites. There is something about this stage of our wisdom that needs to see reality this way, split it into good and bad, light and dark, for just while longer. This is changing though, and quickly now I feel. Good and bad guys in our literature, in film, are softening, becoming complex, tortured, blurred. In some films it is impossible to tell which is which. And a growing number of us prefer it that way, welcome that richness. It feels more accurate, more nuanced, human, natural. The clumsy old opposites feel antiquated, childish, obvious, boring. The new song of wisdom emerging through this crisis in part transcends clumsy opposites, and recognises context, perception, history and creativity together determine what levels of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ we can work into existence, perceive into existence, imagine. This is part of what it means to recognise that it’s up to us, that we are as involved in the process of wising up as those we berate for blocking our progress, our ‘freedom.’

In a few days the northern hemisphere will pass through its longest night. Many will celebrate the imminence of spring, of renewal, in a tradition preceding Christianity by millennia. Bob Dylan sung, “They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn.” There’s something to that, but no two dawns are alike, and the same goes for our darkest hours. And though we are always hoarding, always cleansing, always failing and succeeding, I strongly believe we, as a species, are at the crossroads (crisis) of the profoundest change we have known. Staying humble and hopeful, though hard, is wisest. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

On Education

2011-12-10T04:03:00.000-08:00

Over at Golem’s blog, under his latest post, I made a couple of comments referencing David Graeber’s perception that we are culturally suffering from a failure of nerve, a failure of imagination. This is the reason our outlook appears bleak. Not because it is bleak, but because we can’t see a way out. Writing for the Guardian about the Occupy movement in September this year, Graeber said:

But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible. [ ... ] Even the Economist was running headlines like “Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?” [ ... ] Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.

Why did this happen? Obviously there are far more reasons than a mere blog post can address, but one of them is surely rooted in the education system. We are not put through that system to become critical thinkers, to question, to carry on learning. We are compulsorily put through that system to have our independence of spirit broken, to be made compliant, obedient, susceptible to advertising, propaganda, to fail to care enough about the indignity of factory-line work and consumerism. Consequently, faced with the challenge of creating a new model, we balked. We don’t have it in us. Not after our ‘education’ knocked it out of us, that is.

Now, those are aggressive and sweeping words, but I suggest they hold generally (there are always exceptions). Before I go on, I’d like to point out I do not believe in ‘control’ by supremely gifted puppet masters of some lumpen mass. I do not believe in Us and Them projections. As far as I’m concerned, it’s “We, the 100%,” at least, as a mode of perception more constructive long term than “We, the 99%,” as important as that perception is right now. Our predicament, our reality, is far subtler than Us and Them. Nevertheless, it does serve to look at broad brushstrokes sometimes, especially by way of guidance and as a process for encouraging critical thought.

John Taylor Gatto wrote a paper back in 2003 called, “How public education cripples our kids, and why.” He has written books too, which I strongly recommend. Gatto thoroughly researched the origins of public education, in particular the sort of thinking behind its design and purpose. He singles out Alexander Inglis and his 1918 book, “Principles of Secondary Education”. For Inglis, public education was to be “a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table.” Gatto then describes the six core functions of public education as understood by Inglis:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

And it makes sense to the mindset of that era. Sir Ken Robinson campaigns vigourously for a revolution in the education system, as his talk to the RSA a short while ago attests. In the talk I link to, he says:

It [the education system] was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment, and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. [ ... ] I believe we have a system of education which is modeled on the interests of industrialism, and in the image of it. [ ... ] We still educate children by batches, we put them through the system by age group. Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are?

Gatto would answer that it serves the interests of industry. Lewis Mumford would point out that the ‘owners’ of the machinery hold the machinery in higher regard than the people it is supposed to serve. Chaplin’s “Modern Times” is replete with imagery conceived and composed in angry reaction to this basic truth.

Buckminster Fuller’s account of a childhood experience demonstrates clearly that mode of thinking (scarcity- and fear-based, mixed with what I think of as paternalistic and patrician pragmatism):

Just before I went to Harvard University in 1913 [ ... ] an “uncle” gave me some counsel. He was a very rich “uncle.”[ ... ] “Young man, I think I must tell you some things that won’t make you very happy. [ ... ] Those few of us who are rich and who really have the figures know that it is worse than one chance in one hundred that you can survive your allotted days in any comfort. It is not you or the other fellow; it is you or one hundred others. [ ... If] you have a family of five and wish to prosper—you’re going to have to do it at the expense of five hundred others. So do it as neatly and cleanly and politely as you know how and as your conscience will allow.”
“Utopia or Oblivion”, pp161-2

If you have the responsibility of keeping things going, if you know for certain there’s not enough to go around, of course you need to control the beast that is The Proletariat. The alternative is anarchy and revolution, a bloody waste of time since the outcome can only ever be the rebuilding of the same system with a different ‘elite’ at the helm.

I see no evil here, only people working with what they have. And that’s what we all do. Only, for various reasons I won’t go into here—apart from to again mention that nothing lasts forever, not even paradigms—we are confronted with the challenge of changing course. Our dying (or dead) paradigm is causing terrible damage to the environments which sustain us, social and ecological, and we need new tools and technologies (I use those words in the broadest possible sense) that were not taught us in a school system designed not only to perpetuate the status quo, but also to prevent critical thinking, as well as retard emotional and political maturity.

At the moment I’m studying to become a teacher (oh, the irony). The coursework has brought me again to my John Holt books. In “Instead of Education”, Holt has this to say:

You cannot have human liberty, and the sense of all persons’ uniqueness, dignity, and worth on which it must rest, if you give to some people the right to tell other people what they must learn or know, or the right to say officially and “objectively” that some people are more able and worthy than others. Let any who want to make such judgments make them privately and in the understanding that such judgments can only be personal and subjective. But do not give them any permanent or official position, or the liberty and dignity of your citizens will soon be gone.
pp8-9

For these reasons and others I often shout that we must self-educate, and support each other in our efforts. This is not an easy undertaking, and of course people will, and must be free to wander different paths. While we are engaged in this stage of our journeys and encouraging others to leave the existing paradigm and join us in creating the new, we must bear in mind that we are like a walking wounded, that self-education is also self-healing; that it must be, in some way, about community, and that we need each other too.

Meanwhile, we need not beat ourselves up about not having a ready plan to kick into gear, that our nerve failed, that our beaten down imaginations are having a hard time seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Nor need we despair (though that is part of growing out of the safety of the devil you know), for we can create, we can think critically, we are intelligent, we can find friends and like minds; wisdom is something we can all develop.

Indeed, there is wisdom everywhere we look. We just need to acquire the imagination to see it.

Given To Dream

2011-12-09T00:41:00.000-08:00

The smell of early
punctual morning haze.
Grow out of bed into
your next move. The coffee

of bacon and cheese, orange juice,
the drive. In your movie, graded
to beauty, to best bland,
your next move still far

from the credits, the closing song.
No marketing campaign for you.
(But there is.) No product placement.
(But there is.) You are

on every screen you watch,
an actor, wool pulled over, vacuum packed,
fresh as the front-lawn daisy
your minty-breath dreams.

You are given to dream. Without it
you would not be. With it
you are much less; worn film
of tawdry fabric flecked

with the gold of our imagining;
a tube of toothpaste,
a deodorant, a new oven,
a holiday abroad. Earn it all

dreamed dreamer, and more.
Move on. Move, and move.

From Here to There

2011-12-01T06:11:00.001-08:00

This week I watched an hour long presentation made by two German pioneers (Andreas Popp and Rico Albrecht) in money-system thinking, which laid out the situation we're in, and what we might do about it. My wife, who yawns loudly at all talk of usury, compound interest, bonds, credit money and high powered money etc., found it inspiring and easy to understand. Since we were both of the same opinion, I thought it only helpful to pass on in English the meat of the matter to any and all interested. What is particularly exciting about their presentation to me, was how closely it echoes Charles Eisenstein's plan (which can be read online for free, by the way).

The pair have coined a new word they base on an ancient Greek term for 'usurer' or 'moneylender' (danista) to denote the entire system we suffer under today; "Danistacracy" (Danistakratie in German). I imagine you've already heard of alternative names for our compound interest system, such as Corporatocracy or Kleptocracy, which are instructive enough, but I think this one nails it, since the dynamic that really does the damage is compound interest. Far be it from me to assert this or that term as the best, and Danistacracy is certainly not catchy, but in its meaning the word is accurate and descriptive.

Just as with Charles Eisenstein and Franz Hoermann (and others), the pair are at pains to point out that it's not individual, evil people who are in the way of a Better World, but a system which organizes society along particular lines, with a particular flow and dynamic. To quote Charles Eisenstein once again:

This movement isn’t about the 99% defeating or toppling the 1%. You know the next chapter of that story, which is that the 99% create a new 1%. That’s not what it’s about. What we want to create is the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible.

We can't stay as we are, lop off a few heads, and expect anything other than a 'hello new boss, just like the old boss' event. Until we build from out of our own wisdom and ingenuity a system which transcends and improves on this functionally rapacious Danistacracy we are glued to its inevitable collapse. We have to work on ourselves, do that work, before the systemic and broader social solutions can flower from those efforts. Happily (or frustratingly, depending on your point of view) work on self and work on better systems is more or less the same thing. "The more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible" can only grow out of our intent to build it, and the know-how we learn while trying.

And now on to some graphics:

Popp and Albrecht use the classic pyramid shape to denote the hierarchical and upward flow of wealth to the 'controllers' of the compound interest system. The highest level are the owners and controllers of money themselves, the Danistacracy, who have placed between themselves and the lowest level the dual fogs of "Mainstream media" and "Political theatre", which together represent a kind of virtual reality the producers and doers are surrounded by at the logical bottom.

By the way, I have tweaked their graphic to make it appear more seamless than the original (theirs deploys distinct colours for each segment, and separate blocks to build the pyramid shape), preferring to try to reflect the general oneness of things. Of course there are lines of separation, but I don't believe they're absolute or impenetrable.

Of note is that Media sits above the "Political theatre" segment which, in the Popp/Albrecht presentation, is further subdivided into 'corrupt' and 'stupid' politicians; those who know the game is crooked but play it to line their own pockets, and those blindly loyal to this ideology or that. Either way, the media/politics region is, in its broad effect, a show, a self-sustaining virtual reality to divert attention from what the Matrix film so poetically called "The Real". This virtual reality hides the system's deepest dynamic, which is ongoing extortion of the producers and doers, an insatiable rapacity (how can usury be satisfied?) creating "The Desert of The Real", the destruction of the planet we are not permitted to see. Some figures to that end:

Professor Senf mentions the marriage of a poor boy to a rich girl. The figures are startling: Poor Boy earned 4,600 DM monthly, before tax, Rich Girl earned from interest over 650,000 DM daily (quoted from Bild, 27/7/1990). [snip] I wonder if Ms Quandt and Mr Klatten are still married, and if happily so.
Source

Albrecht informs his audience that a billionaire with a normal investment spread in various stocks and bonds would earn 50 one-family homes every year simply as a 'reward' for possessing that much money. (And no, money cannot 'work for you.' While the money might have been 'earned,' the interest on it most certainly is not.) Whether your earnings on interest are 650,000 DM a day or the money equivalent of 50 houses a year, that kind of money-growth has to be backed by something. In other words, there have to be millions upon millions of not-so-rich producers and doers creating the goods and services that give that 'earned' interest its value. How could it be otherwise? If all of us 'earned' from interest that kind of income, what would we do with it? It would of course be hyper-inflationary. In brief, the Danistacracy system requires, by design, extreme rich-poor divides. And they are stubborn divides, precisely because they are systemically generated and required.

Another factoid or 'data point' Albrecht brings to our attention, is that having some money in the bank, say, 300,000 euros, does not mean you are a net beneficiary of the usury system. The 6,000 or so you might earn a year (gross) does not compensate for the hidden cost of interest repayments passed on by manufacturers, shippers and retailers everywhere. Prices are up to twice as high as they would be in an interest-free money system, according to Abrecht. That is, even if you are a net saver, inflation corrodes your wealth 'invisibly'—as the money supply grows faster than goods and services can—, while the simple passing on of debt-costs to customers, concealed in prices, 'steals' wealth too, hands it over to the Danistacracy. Albrecht tells us it is only those with 1,000,000 or more in relatively liquid assets who actually net-benefit; the famous, symbolic 1%. Again, and very importantly, this does not make them the enemy. As Gandhi said,"Love the sinner, hate the sin."

Also prominent in Albrecht's talk is the exponential function. He cites the German Green Party's demand for 2.8% growth, but points out that such would mean Germany producing twice as much as 25 years from now, four times as much 50 years from now, eight times as much 100 years from now, and so on. Why should we want to do this? Why is economic growth Good Beyond Question? Why aren't we discussing the obvious absurdity of such proposals? Because the usury system—which its beneficiaries will protect at all costs—must be left behind if we are to leave the Perpetual Growth Grave Train behind (yes, I do mean "Grave"!)

So, what to do? Here is their suggested 'solution' in graphic form:

(I have translated "Soziales Bodenrecht" as "The Commons", even though "Allmende" is the proper German word for "commons." Any help from my German readership would be appreciated!)

Econosophy's slogan is, "Demote money, promote wealth", which I see as a description of a direction, not of a goal. The point is of course that the journey is the destination, the means are the ends. There can be no end point we reach where we say, with relief, "Finished! At last we can stop working!" Change is the only constant. However, humans still need 'where we are now and where we're headed' linear-thinking crutches, so graphic representations serve us still, and help focus the mind on the broader points. They are:

A money which rewards investment in community, which captures the Piraha saying, "I store my meat in the belly of my brother." Hoarding 'wealth' to protect Me And Mine is actually, seen over the long term, a fear-based addiction which exacerbates itself—self-fulfilling prophecy—while slowly destroying community. Investing in the health of the networks which enable our healthy living makes far more sense. Negative interest money is a way of promoting such a wisdom. It demotes money and promotes wealth.
A guaranteed income, which decouples money and work, ends the notion that we must 'earn' a living. If we each receive a share of those fruits generated by the collective ingenuity of humanity and nature, we are notionally freed by these gifts to carry on contributing to that process which sustains us. It demotes money and promotes wealth.
Expanding the commons encourages us to recognize that property is a harmful illusion, which can only engender more fear and greed. To promote true wealth, which can only be the health of the broader system—including environment and community—we must be invested in it, 'know' we are components of it, that as we treat it, so we treat ourselves. The commons is the correct domain for encouraging this deep sharing.
A free press is part of the open and transparent dissemination of information, which I feel would be an absolute inevitability should we manage to construct a social system based on the other three themes thus far discussed. I would have had "Open education system" (or similar) in its place, but hey, I don't agree with anyone on everything, and a free press is certainly something humanity could use right now.

As to the steps they—Popp and Albrecht—propose to get us from here to there, it starts with legal measures, and proceeds to what I think of as secession should the 'legal' path fail.

First, they will draw up the details for a truly publicly owned central bank with a monopoly on money creation—no more commercial bank money creation. They think of this as a money commons in a left-wing way; a money creation process owned by the state. Now, I'm not a 100% fan of this idea, because it concentrates too much power in one organization, but would support it with reservations; negative interest money, an expanding commons and guaranteed income are part of the plan. I also have not heard Popp and Albrecht state that no other monies (e.g., Ithaca Hours) would be permitted, so my reservations are minor. At least Popp and Albrecht aren't proposing this and only this.

Second, national debts are to be forgiven. Or, they would arrange a pro-actively organized sovereign default. The details here involve buying back bonds from e.g. pension institutions and 'ordinary' citizens who have invested in government debt, by exchanging them for what Albrecht refers to as Bankguthaben. This is, to my English ears, a strange choice of words, since Guthaben can be variously translated as 'credit,' 'assets,' 'balance,' 'deposit,' and even 'money on account.' So in the absence of information to the contrary, I'm going to assume they mean negative interest money, which is what Eisenstein proposes; the targeted buying off of existing government debt with non-debt, negative interest money. In that all pensioners would be the recipients of a guaranteed income, this is nowhere near as draconian as it might seem. As for inflation; yes, says Albrecht, this act would be a one-time inflationary pressure, but considering the current system is suicidally inflationary by design, a short burst of inflation followed by a balancing out is the wiser choice, particularly when the alternative is driving the usury system ever onwards, until there's nothing left but blackened toast to peck at and squabble over.

(A brief aside on 'all money is debt:' When I say non-debt money, I mean money the government prints into existence, not borrows into existence. I believe the distinction is an important one.)

Albrecht then asks, somewhat rhetorically, if the solution is so obvious, how come representative democracy isn't delivering us from the insanity of the current money system? He supposes, for the sake of pursuing the 'legal' path, that the parties might be Too Busy dealing with the humdrum to put together the necessary laws for enacting such a plan. Popp's and Albrecht's institute are, therefore, with the help of constitutional and other lawyers, preparing precisely such a body of law, which they will present to the German government shortly. At least then it cannot be said this 'legal' avenue was not trod.

Should it transpire that the Popp/Albrecht Statute (or whatever such proposals are called) is not greeted with euphoria, they plan, as a necessary second 'legal' step, to write a new constitution for Germany. Such is granted by existing law in the event that citizens feel the government is not acting in their best interests. Again, the likelihood such a new constitution would usher in the sustainable system proposed is vanishingly small, so where they expect to be most active, and where they are investing their real energies, is in building the new system from scratch; secession, more or less.

The virtual reality created by the Mainstream media and Political theatre is very effective. We cannot expect to attract anything close to a majority with such ideas. Indeed, Popp reckons 5% of the population a tipping-point amount. In Germany that would be about 4 million souls. That's a whole bag of bananas right there, enough to include a rich vein of skills such as farming, plumbing, housebuilding, car maintenance, energy production (renewables), doctors, hospitals, IT expertise, lawyers, and so on. The point is to network, pool resources, build, learn, prepare. The act of 5% of the population leaving the existing system behind would collapse it, but there would then be something new to move over to, the requisite experience to take the strain, so to speak. Of course, there are no guarantees, but I don't see Doing Nothing as a reasonable option, and agree with Popp and Albrecht that we are in fact morally obliged to rebel. The system is that decadent and criminal, and obviously so.

I want to close with a quote from Europe's new banking overlord, Mario Draghi (thanks to Charles Wheeler for this):

What is clear then is that any fiscal integration will require fiscal discipline aka austerity and this in turn is the prerequisite for any imminent ECB liquidity and for Eurobonds over the medium-term. Yes, budget cuts will deepen the recessions in the periphery. But, there is no way around it; politically, no solution in Europe will unlock the sovereign debt crisis without fiscal consolidation. All of the political leaders are aware that this is so.

"All of the political leaders are aware this is so." Money is God. Obey, or perish. Price is the One True emissary of value. If a thing does not make economic sense (money-sense), it does not make sense. If it does not make money-profit, if it does not generate Economic Growth, it is not worth considering.

This is the binary thinking we are up against. We are morally obliged to rebel.

Now I’m Mad. For a While, Anyway

2011-11-30T09:14:00.000-08:00

I shouldn’t be mad, I should be Wisely Calm. Serenely intelligent, with a gentle but knowing smile. Sadly, I’m very human, quite naïve, desperately romantic, and want this absurd system behind me, done with, over. Of course that’s going to take years, but I’m impatient. And sometimes, the old sense of being tiny in the face of a crushingly enormous juggernaut blind to the damage it does, it gets to me. It does. I want more power. There. I said it. And this is why.

Central banks have acted in a globally unified move to reduce central bank to commercial bank lending rates by 0.5%. Even more than on the rumour of the IMF boning up a cool 600bn euros for Italy, the markets are climaxing over this. There's coke and jism all over the shop. Adam's Invisible Hand is hard at work, pumping those boys good and proper. And it isn't even Friday yet! Here are some choice quotes from a Guardian article I just perused:

The Bank of England joined the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the ECB, the Bank of Canada and the Swiss National Bank in taking the measures. Stock markets around the world surged after the central banks said they would cut the price of emergency dollar loans to cash-strapped banks by 0.5 percentage points, and extend the scheme until February 2013.

[snip]

"Clearly the world's central bankers have had enough of all the political mud-slinging and intransigence and they've decided to take the situation by the scruff of the neck."

How nice to have had enough of politicians who can’t seem to cure the worst debt crisis in history by forcing their underlings to pony up their futures, without rioting, for generations to come, as tribute to the system that serves only two functions; growth and enslavement. How meek and incompetent of them. How indecisive. How immature. Not that I’m a fan of politicians, but doesn’t that financial-expert view of things sum it up nicely.

It’s the money, stupid. No money; no planet. No credit; no planet. No debt; catastrophe, mayhem, disaster, raining fire, earthquakes, boiling seas, kraken devouring lambs and babies. You name it, we’ll do it.

The central bankers fear that if financial institutions rein in credit, it will hit ordinary consumers and businesses, and threaten a double-dip recession in the world economy.

"The purpose of these actions is to ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity," they said in a joint statement.

Scary, huh? The very last thing we want is a double dip recession. Just think, wages might stagnate. People might lose their jobs. Standards of living might fall. Crime might rise. Any one of those would be, quite frankly, unacceptable. Nobody in their right minds would want all of them at once. So thank the central bankers that the markets are rising again. Because if there is one thing that is crystal clear by now, it’s that we all benefit, people and planet, when the markets are surging upwards.

Trot out the bonuses! Those ‘hard working’ folk in finance can buy their wives and Class Act Escorts another Porsche Cayenne or Audi Q1.

The Audi Bonus. “One in each colour, sir?”

But this is boring, isn’t it? This is like the twentieth time this month a ‘fresh injection of liquidity’ has revived the fetid rot this system clearly is. Squeezed some noxious activity out of it. I mean, apart from it being historic and everything, this is getting just a tad repetitive. Let’s try and spice it up a little, remind ourselves what we’re dealing with here:

"This may have been a signal that the money markets were a short shove away from complete collapse."

Complete collapse? Ooh! I think I can ... yep, there’s a butterfly in my stomach. Thanks, Jeremy Cook, for bringing a little excitement back into my old body. The Cinema of the Media sure knows how to knock us out, eh? Wham, bam, boom, up and down like jet fueled yoyo. It don’t get much better than this. And the only way to fly in this beast is passively. Lie back, let the Masters take care of business, and hope you don't belong to one of the billions about to get squished under the juggernaut's weight. Like a bug.

[ADDENDUM, 18:51 CET: This point should have made it into the article, but them's the breaks. Lowering interest rates worked like a charm so far, got banks lending again, right? It says in the text books that low interest rates = cheap money = lending and then Even More economic growth. It's in the text books, clear as day. With charts and everything. So let's do that again, because last time people didn't notice enough. There wasn't a sufficient Attention Quotient (AQ) operating at that moment in time (2008, 2009, and 2010 or so, roughly). It didn't really bite, you know? Didn't quite find purchase as we'd hoped. This time, now that the problem has been taken "by the scruff of the neck", those eye-wateringly low interest rates will have the effect the text books promise. Everybody knows that!]

Know?

2011-11-29T23:24:00.000-08:00

Do not know. Turn that off now.
Run down these words a while
knowing nothing, especially not
where all this is going.

Sand gives underfoot;
balance shifts. Tip with it.
In a tree—if you still climb—
new balance again. Swim

through curved sea, be curved.
One by one never adds up.
Anger strums a wave into you,
then out, a wind to brave, or buck

into its being, its dizzy self
dazzling as reality. The circled food,
coming back to you and new you,
roots in the pocked depths

of Everywhere, like branch
or dune, wave or shout, bright face
or wake for a sleep. You
cannot know. I know I don’t.

Scatter sand to other forms.
Thrash water to settled pools.
Wind back the weather again
to clouds of trees that bow.

Breathe them in. There is no time
so particular
its every nano can be noted,
jotted down; it vanishes

just as you get there,
like the threads of your thoughts,
these words, their meaning
slipping out of every crack

your cupped hands leave. It is
as if this never happened.
But of course it did. At least
this much you know.

Nailed it Again! Econosophy Shouts, the IMF Listens

2011-11-28T00:13:00.000-08:00

The IMF could bail out Italy with up to 600 billion euros ($794 billion), an Italian newspaper reported on Sunday, as Prime Minister Mario Monti came under pressure to speed up anti-crisis measures.
Source

Of course, that's not a cast-iron promise, but it's a good start.

The last thing humanity wants is for growth to stop. As I penned a few days ago, what we're all longing for is nonstop growth of economic activity into all aspects of our lives, without exception. Reading my heartfelt plea, the wise folk at the IMF stepped up to the plate, and promised to Do What They Can.

A trustworthy source at the IMF I'm not permitted to name, said:

These are troubled times, Toby. After reading your words we realised action had to be taken. We hastily met in a meeting room designed for these sorts of things, and put it out to our friends in the press that there was money to be loaned after all. It sure as hell looks that way. What with digibits being as cheap as dirt, and zeros cheaper still, we felt the least we could do was sink Italy further into debt. There's nothing like the cold hand of fear to get things moving, I've found.

Asian markets surged higher with relief, Europe has nosed upwards with the glimmering vigour of a rambunctious dolphin, and the US is expected to be giddily euphoric now that fair Europa is flush with cash once more. Even I, old man that I am, have a new spring in my stride and am waxing lyrical again. Oh, happy day.

I don't expect thanks, because I'm very humble. A quiet life is all I ask for. With a little luck and a wisp of magic we'll all get what exactly we want very soon. Christmas is coming!

(You heard it here first.)

UPDATE (15:45 CET): IMF "very angry" with Econosophy, trusted source tells Toby to watch his dirty little mouth, and not to call her anymore. This just in:

Stock markets boosted by rumours of bailout deal for Italy, though IMF denies reports of aid package proposal
Source

Nevertheless, the markets are aiming for the moon, riding the creosote fumes like the drunken old pros they truly are.

Perpetual Growth? Yes Please!

2011-11-25T03:16:00.000-08:00

“Fomulare, formulare, von der Wiege bis zur Bahre!” (German saying, meaning, "Forms, forms, from the cradle to the grave!")

Finally, after world champion procrastination on my part, and a warning letter on their part, I filled in the form my German health insurance company had sent me, to record my change of status and Keep Them Informed. I didn’t enjoy a second of it, and the process had my wife and I shouting at each other angrily, with our children looking on. Later I posted it. Soon I will have the insurance company’s response. My wife’s and my reaction to this overall hideous experience of staying ‘insured’ was to plan leaving Germany at the earliest convenience. For now, I’ll just chalk that up to emotion. I mean, where would we go?

At around two o’clock this morning, it occurred to me that forms are the perceptive organs of companies, bureaucracies and other organizations. And there is probably a relationship along the lines of; the bigger the organization, the cruder and more insulting the form. Anyway, it occurred to me as I lay sleepless in the 2 a.m. gloom, that The Form is similar to money in that it is a crude and poor measure of value. I am Toby Russell. Only the tiniest fraction of my value can be recorded by ticking boxes on a form. But there I am, split up onto various pieces of paper and as various bits and bytes, scattered across the storage space of various companies and bureaucracies, in Form form, the information on me therein owned by them. It occurred to me, again, that ‘measuring’ people is best done intuitively, organically, dynamically, artistically, scientifically, patiently, flexibly, forgivingly, wisely, and that there can be no prescription for doing so. But we’re stuck with The Form and checking boxes; in fact, more and more of it as the economy grows, or tries to. Because whether in the government or private sector, creating forms, reading them, responding to them, is all Paid Work. And, the more Paid Work there is, the better the world is. The more money changing hands, the richer we are. We all want jobs. We all need money. Bring on those forms. Hand over that money.

The gloom is a fertile place for an imaginative man in a bad mood awake in the wee hours for the second night in a row. I found myself writing a heartfelt paean to my love, Economic Growth. Enjoy.

The year is the future, and Global Government has just decreed, in the interests of economic growth, to sell language to the highest bidders, then establish a public-private partnership by part-auctioning words to the people. Virgin Vocabulary won the lexis, Microten$e won all tenses, and GM Grammar got the rules and punctuation. Buying part-ownership of a word meant earning money for every usage of that word, with 1% of that money going to Virgin Vocabulary for administrative costs. Ownership of tense and grammar was deemed more sensible in wholly private form. The incredible complexity of monitoring language use across the planet was child’s play, due to biotech advances enabling scientists to ensure every human born was genetically equipped with bio-recording equipment, Genetic ID (GID) account, and a Frequency Interface Device for automating money transfers from GID account to GID account. No one needed to worry; the whole thing worked Like Magic.

Still, there were some small problems. Wealthy bidders bought up all the common words, like “the,” “and,” “that,” the pronouns, “thank,” “you,” “no,” “yes,” “please,” “bankrupt,” and the swear words too. The poor got the scraps, like “obviate,” “panegyric,” “extemporaneous,” “antidisestablishmentarianism,” and “abstruse.” Nevertheless, GDP figures showed huge gains in the opening months, so economists could afford to ignore the rising levels of debt among the poor, who were increasingly forced to use morse code, semaphore, sign language and doodles to communicate with one another. State education suffered terribly. However, the poor couldn’t always avoid speaking in the public-private language; private companies and government agencies alike would only listen in English.

“Necessity is the mother of invention!” smiled cloned president Obusha III, and commended the poor for their hard work and making the planet proud, but gently hinted too that socks ought to be pulled up, lest our most precious, commonly owned treasure, language, fall into disrepair. “I love freedom!” he beamed, before stepping back into the White House.

But, as is the nature of things, boom became bust as debt became unsustainable. The initial flush of growth tapered off to become Anaemic, and plans long in the making were finally rolled out before a grateful public. The people were informed that airplanes had been spraying the planet’s atmosphere for weeks, and that this harmless spray was made of a nanobot swarm whose programming it was to barcode every molecule of air in existence, as well as equip every person with a barcode-reader at the back of their mouth. The nanobots had since self-destructed, having fulfilled their mission.

“Mission accomplished!” declared Obusha III.

“We love technology, we love Obusha!” the people found themselves chanting (the only Free Words reserved for Free Use, in that combination and tense, exclamation mark optional).

The government, it transpired, had decreed and conducted a fair and impartial Initial Public Offering, fully automated, which had assigned an equal portion of the planet’s air to every citizen of earth. All were equal owners of air, and the poor set about training themselves to need less breaths per day, and spending more time underwater, somehow. They were up for the challenge, inspired to work hard and move up that ladder.

However, equality is not built to last. Polluted air was bought up by the rich on the Free Air Exchange, its price rose, and the poor living in over-populated, polluted areas found themselves owing more per breath than they earned. Days after the initial public offering, Artificial Air Inc was established, and began selling Synthetic Air Creators (SACs) to those who could afford them. SACs took the form of an ingenious device worn invisibly under one’s nostrils. The devices harnessed zero-point energy from the vacuum to literally rearrange free radicals and other atomic material not covered in the Public Air Act into pure, non-barcoded air. CO2 breathed out was barcoded by the device and owned by the device’s owner. Vegetation processing that CO2 into oxygen was engineered to keep the barcode, and hence ownership, unchanged. Of course, SACs sold like hot cakes. The poor found themselves sinking deeper into debt, and could only afford imitation SACs (if at all), which were unreliable, even to the point of poisoning many.

But it was all GDP growth, thus was good while it was good. Bust followed boom again; you can’t change nature! Necessity is the mother of invention, and the ingenuity of humanity knows no No More. Eyes became recording devices as morse code, semaphore, doodles and sign language became privatized. GDP grew, then tapered off. Smiles, hugs, laughter and winks all fell under the auctioneer’s gavel. GDP grew, then tapered off, this time in weeks as GDP measuring technologies were by now fine tuned down to the nanosecond. Market’s panicked. Mother’s milk was next, then the pleasure felt while enjoying a quiet moment. Biotech delivered the goods the very next day to prevent systemic collapse yet again, by privatizing thinking itself with yet more ingenious brainwave recorders.

At last everything we do, from gazing out of windows, to stroking our beards, petting our pets, feeding our fish, waving hello to a friend across the street, burping, farting, scratching our behinds and everything you can think of, Dear Paying Reader (see below), cost money, and everything that was, was embraced by GDP Almighty.

The End. (Literally.)

You owe me $5,343,694.45 for reading this, which I think is a bargain. (I owe more for writing it, so help a brother out, won’t you!?)

Health, Health Insurance, and Totalitarianism

2011-11-21T23:28:00.000-08:00

[This post is a bit of a moan. Apologies in advance.]

It’s been 21 days since I left my job, on purpose, to become something else; a better Toby Russell, a better husband, a better father, and a better Earthling. Though I had wanted to leave work for many years, the decision was, I can assure you, very difficult to reach; I have a wife and two daughters and happen to be, for many reasons, our family’s sole bread-winner. Nevertheless, my wife and I arrived at that decision together (I did all the pushing, it must be said!), and I still believe it to have been both brave and wise. And noble too.

This latest leap into the unknown has not, however, been without its shocks, even in these first few weeks. The one I want to discuss in this post was served to us cold by Germany’s health system.

My wife and I, plus one three year old daughter, arrived in Berlin in July 2000. I had no job, no German, and no health insurance. None of this was a ‘system problem,’ since I had both savings and income from my recently deceased father’s dry cleaning chain. And, back in 2000, one was allowed to live in Germany without health insurance. That is, any visits we made to the doctor before I had found employment, we paid for in cash. This included my wife’s overnight stay in a hospital for an operation she needed after miscarrying shortly after our arrival in Berlin.

Three weeks ago, we learned precisely that loose, temporary ‘opting out’ we enjoyed eleven years ago is no longer legal. I am not allowed to step out of the system and receive medical care, even though I could afford it should such prove necessary, even for a few months while I train myself to become an English teacher. It is illegal not to have explicit health insurance. I have paid roughly 65,000 euros over ten years into the German health system, but my enforced ‘largesse’ has afforded me close to nothing, it seems; now that my income is zero for a while appears to be irrelevant. Even though I am now income-poor, still I must pay a hefty amount to cover our four-person family, close to 600 euros a month, from zero income, if things don’t go my way.

Here’s the deal. I plan to become self-employed (all things being equal), which is a social status distinct from employed, unemployed, student, housewife, and so on. The reason for this is to stay as far away from corporations as possible, and as close to gift and alternative currency communities as I can manage. But when you’re self-employed, the health insurance companies, as instructed by the government, assume you enjoy an income of around 3,700 euros a month, which equates to health insurance contributions of close to 600 euros per month. That, or they take your last year’s income and calculate from there. In my case, that happens to equate to about 600 euros a month, even though I’m changing from an income to no income.

Now, our family costs the health system nowhere near 600 a month, which, while employed I didn’t mind, since that excess pays for those who earn less than I did. Or so I thought. Now that I am earning much less than I did, so as to do something noble and brave, I am asked to pay as I did before. Pray tell, whither did that 65,000 go?

Of course, if it turns out that in the first year of my life as a self-employed person I only earn a total of nothing, they’ll pay back a portion of my contributions, but that doesn’t help me now. And that I could pay the monthly 600 for a while isn’t really the point; my family does not cost the health system anywhere near that much. Combined, we visit the doctor a total of something like ten times a year.

Here’s a brief rundown of our load on the system these last ten years. My wife gave birth to our second daughter in a hospital in Berlin, and her pregnancy included two or three yoga classes, one night in the hospital, and two post-natal visits by a midwife. Maybe that cost one to two thousand euros. I had a shoulder operation and physiotherapy, but paid for the three nights at the hospital, and about 20% of the therapy sessions before and after. I should point out that the operation was necessary in the first place because of medical incompetency (five week delay of the MRT and two false diagnoses of the originating problem). I did not sue, because I know no system is perfect, and hate all that acrimony, not to mention it would take years and get me nowhere at all.

Anyway, too much griping for one post I’m sure (and others have it far harder than I do), but what I’m getting at is the state’s inability to deal with us citizens as unique human beings. It is utterly irrelevant that I try to live honourably, that I try not to burden the state, that my shoulder operation came from a cycling accident (I cycle to be environmentally friendly and stay healthy), that I did not sue the health insurance company for the delayed MRT, nor the doctors who erroneously misdiagnosed my condition. The state simply cannot perceive any of this. The state is too big, my life details too tiny, too unusual. We each exist in the state’s clumsy eyes as something that must fit into one box or other. If we don’t, we are an annoyance, something to be sorted, categorised somehow, which means extra work, hassle, etc.

Furthermore, my health insurance company, “Barmer GEK”, is a corporation under public law, a strange Germanic institution I don’t fully understand. It is public, hence not categorised as private, but this seems to be more a nicety than anything else. However, it is not funded by taxes generally, but by members’ payments; an employer is obliged to pay half an employee’s contribution, but the wage slips only shows, in the taxation section, the half paid by the employee; mine used to show about 300 euros. A self-employed person pays 100%, hence I would be asked to pay 600 if I adopted that status. Barmer also has legal autonomy; it, not the state, runs it. Its public nature is therefore somewhat cloudy and impenetrable. I’ve been unable to work out its ownership structure and profit requirements.

I went to Barmer for for face to face advice, trawled its enormously confusing web site for information, and the strong sense I get is that it wants as much money out of me as possible, not what’s best for Toby Russell. The very notion that 600 euros is a lot of money for someone on no income does not compute. I, a 45 year old ‘head’ of a family, just should not give up a paying job to do something ‘nobler.’ The woman I saw at Barmer could not relate to my story at all, and advised me to register as unemployed, because, I assume, that way tax payers would be footing my bills, but at least Barmer would be getting its money. (I will not register as unemployed.)

(Most likely the health system/financial category I must assume is that of ‘student,’ since that is what I am right now—students pay far lower contributions of around 150 euros a month (still very high in my opinion). However, whether the state is capable of recognising me as a student remains to be seen; I’m doing a remote learning course from a college based in England, though it’s affiliated with an American university.)

This is all very personal stuff, most unlike what I normally write for Econosophy. My reason for burdening you with all this runs as follows; to work towards something better than that which currently exists, we must at least irritate existing structures, and thereby isolate ourselves too. Doing so quickly makes very plain how cumbersome and inhumane The System is, how machine-like, how insensitive. In the (purported) interest of ‘efficiency’ and handling enormous numbers of human beings in as uniform a way as possible, we have murdered most of our humanity, destroyed our ability to deal with each other sensitively, case-by-case, with familiarity, community and care. This feeds through into our treatment of the environment of course. This includes too our broader concept of health, which, in a Money-God System such as ours, must make a profit (whatever that is). Which means disease and ill health are good for GDP, which is Good by default. Which means my tiny attempt to Do Good for family, humanity and environment alike are in fact problems, not cures, are greeted with suspicion and annoyance, not with open arms. And this while we all complain that things have to change.

What is hard during transition is finding a minimal platform within the system strong and free enough to be the financial/economic ground I can stand on, while launching myself and my family into a new way of being. The German system has a strong grip on its citizens. We are not allowed, for example, to take our children out of school and teach them at home. Alternative schools pursuing a healthier and wiser attitude to teaching children all cost lots of money, and state sanctioned ones are quickly losing their funding. Organic food costs far more than its poisoning counterpart. Hence, only the rich can afford not to damage the environment, to put their children through a sensible school system. Or, put another way, it costs more to do good than bad. Unhealthy. Unsane. There can be no true profit in such a system.

It may well be that a radical change of life-style is soon necessary for my family and me, including selling our flat and leaving Germany (to where??), but that has to wait for now. For now this awkward middle road is a necessary evil.

My conclusion is that doing good is ‘bad’ and painful when the good you choose to do fundamentally opposes the paradigm of the existing system. It is not that this system can do no good, but rather that all paradigms outlive their usefulness eventually. That’s when the trouble starts. Today, The System is global, tightly integrated, monstrously banal, insensitive and greedy. It is an immature, growth-addicted beast screaming for more, and can only rage at those voices calling for it to no longer be what it is. Any fundamental change is effectively death (systems are what they do), and even what I am doing with my attempt to earn less, do more for community, submit less tribute to The System, is infuriating anathema to it. And though what I am doing is peaceful in intent, it can only be perceived as ‘violent’ by the monster it threatens. In fact the more peacefully I oppose, the more threatening, violent and alien my actions appear. This truism scales up of course. So though I am small, and want to stay that way, though the net effect of what I have thus far ‘accomplished’ is infinitesimal, we are many. The more of us cohesively ‘opting out,’ pursuing new ways of building and being community, the more upheaval we will unleash. We must know this, and deeply. Knowing this we must, as the main part of our opting out, Build the New; food networks, transportation networks, currency networks, skill networks. Unless we have some roughly viable collection of systems and methodologies well practiced and (almost) running, all we are doing by opting out on masse is initiating chaos. An angry revolution is not going to cut it. Only the mad want that. Not being mad (I hope!) I’m thinking long term, but within the context of The System I am not permitted to escape, even my little beginning is an annoyance, and filled with daunting frustrations.

The Way is long and hard it seems.

On Property

2011-11-17T00:51:00.000-08:00

To be able to freely buy and sell something means that is has been dissociated from its original matrix of relationships, in other words, that it has become “alienable.”
Charles Eisenstein, "Sacred Economics", p70

We have perhaps a general principle: to make something saleable, in a human economy, one needs to rip it from its context. That’s what slaves are: people stolen from the community that made them what they are. As strangers to their new communities, slaves no longer had mothers, fathers, kin of any sort. [p146]
The mere fact of their [slaves’] existence set a precedent. The value of a human life could, sometimes, be quantified; but if one was able to move from A = A (one life equals another) to A = B (one life = one hundred cloths), it was only because the equation was established at the point of a spear. [p144]
David Graeber, “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”

Property is a deeply flawed concept, because it divides the indivisible. Imagine you have some land with a fence around it. The fence says, “Within this perimeter everything belongs to me. Everything outside this perimeter does not.” What does this claim mean?

I think we can eke out its meaning by stripping Universe of everything except that which falls within the perimeter of the fence. So imagine a plot of farmland, with pigs, goats, sheep, crops, part of a stream, house, apple and pear trees, and sheds. Then imagine completely isolating that ‘property’ from everything that lies beyond the fence. Everything; the rest of the stream, weather, air, the rest of the planet, the sun, stars, gravity ... everything. What is that property then? Absolutely nothing. Fully isolated from Universe it can have no meaning whatsoever, yet this is precisely what we attempt to do with the concept of property; to isolate a ‘thing’ from everything it is not. To rip it from its context. To enclose it. To enslave it. To be in control of it. To own it.

So why do we have it? Well, sir, it was an accident. And very involved. I didn’t mean it, it just sort of happened. Seriously. What with one thing and another it was only a matter of time before we sapiens started experimenting with seeds, building more permanent shelters, and enjoying the feeling, however self-deceptive, of ‘controlling’ nature in that way. Perhaps it made us feel secure and powerful, perhaps it was just exciting and interesting, like when the penny drops and you ‘get’ it. Anyway, such was the beginning of farming, and farming is the beginning of My-Realm=Domesticated, Not-My-Realm=Wild. And an early stage of science too; if I do this, what happens? Farming is at root one consequence of the famous Self-Other split, The Fall, Expulsion from Eden, exit from the Mother-Child Symbiosis; Now I Am And Know It, therefore You Are Not Me.

This Separation is not all bad (nothing is), but it did of course begin in ignorance of the consequences of its outcomes, just as we all remain in ignorance of the consequences of our actions, just as ignorance is an absolutely inescapable part of striving to know. But all this is only the background.

Property as we enjoy it today in the legal and therefore practical sense stems from Roman Law. And property in Roman Law stems from slavery; that is, what rights a slave owner has over a slave. Of course total, including disposal, or destruction. And it is disposal that distinguishes between full access (say as a renter of a property) and private ownership of it. If I legally own a thing, I can destroy it, if I only have access rights, I can’t. And yet there are qualifications; burning flags and such, as well as burning money. Are we legal owners, in the proprietary sense, of the notes and coins we have in our pockets, or of the national flags we purchase? Or are we mere part time users of them, temporary guardians? Is it legal for an ordinary citizen to burn notes or melt coins? Wikipedia:

In the United States, burning banknotes is prohibited under 18 U.S.C. § 333: Mutilation of national bank obligations, which includes "any other thing" that renders a note "unfit to be reissued. In an amicus brief for Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, Solicitor General Seth Waxman writes that arresting an individual who removes the corner dollar values "may expose a counterfeiting operation". It is unclear if the statute has ever been applied in response to the complete destruction of a bill. Certainly people have publicly burned small amounts of money for political protests that were picked up by the media — Living Things at South by Southwest, Larry Kudlow on The Call — without apparent consequence.

And yet the state shreds cash when it is handed over directly in payment of taxes. So money as private property is probably quite a grey legal area, since money is a commons even if the state-market apparatus promotes it otherwise. Being fiat, it ‘belongs’ to the sovereign. And the fractional reserve system is a multiple-claim, multiple-use system; each central bank dollar endures multiple claims on it in the form of credit money. Credit money issued by commercial banks is nothing but a claim on central bank or high powered money, which only the sovereign can create and destroy. We only use the notes and coins that pass through our pockets and purses; we are not their proprietors. Can a sovereign be a legal private property owner? Even a King is several. A democratically elected government more so. Kings are The Land. Governments are The People. They ‘own’ severally, on behalf of. So it’s not clear what’s going on here, right at the root of all exchange, when it comes to property. The very medium we deploy to exchange ownership, we do not own. I see that as a profound contradiction. And that money is a medium; that is a contradiction too. How can we be owners of a medium, like language, or inches?

This is something of a tangent, but it plays into the central idea; property as a concept is illogical.

Let’s look at the human body. Is my body my private property? I argue that the question is absurd, since it implies there is ‘in me’ some Not-Body component which could conceivably be ‘owner’ of my body. Let’s call this Not-Body entity “Soul.” To ‘own’ ‘my’ body I, at the conceptual level, need to have a Soul, a component sufficiently Not-Body actively to do the owning of Body. We have to separate ourselves (strange word, isn't it) in two to talk of ownership of self. To bring this into sharper relief, we would not ask if a tree owns its body, or a mountain. What about cats and dogs, or cattle, pigs, sheep? What about chickens and ‘their’ eggs? It is only because we think, at a very deep level, that humans are somehow Soul and Body (not only Body, or only Soul—to my mind they are the same thing) that we can even come up with the nonsensical idea that a human has ‘ownership’ of his or her body. As for 'control' of the body, how total is it really, and where does it come from? Do you choose your skin colour and gender before you are born? Control your every thought? The aging process? The air you breathe, and its constitution?

In exactly the same way, arising from exactly the same error of thought, we think we can be proprietors of ‘things’ ‘out there.’ We do not have a body, we are body. Or, we do not have a soul, we are soul. (See how it sounds awkward to express reality closer to its ‘truth’? “I am body inextricably embedded in Universe.”) Furthermore, as David Graeber points out, body cannot be separated from its context without either killing it—if the separation is total (e.g., into a vacuum)—or deeply harming it, as in slavery. And aren’t such things always done at the point of a spear?

There is violence of some kind in the birth of property.

And then there’s scarcity. I asked why we have property, and have suggested an error in our understanding of reality gave inexorable rise to the concept, and I think this is a valid observation (it’s not mine; this analysis ‘belongs’ to the anarchist tradition). But there is a ‘practical’ reason for property too, and that is the perception of scarcity, which also arises from the Expulsion from Eden, the conceptual division of the world into Me and NotMe.

Because I am Separate, I must defend myself against those parts of the environment that are dangerous or deadly. Fair enough, and a living system does not need a Separate Self to be capable of self-defense. But as this gets tangled up with farming and self-awareness, the portion of reality I claim as ‘mine’—because I have developed it, worked it, made it into what it is—stays permanently insufficient, even with ‘surplus.’ This is complicated and requires long, winding arguments and discussions to bring into focus, but I hope a short version can do the idea some justice. I’ll begin with a couple of quotes.

What we now call scarcity can only emerge out of these exclusive rights of the proprietor.
“Property, Interest and Money”, Otto Steiger and Gunnar Heinsohn, p44. My translation.

The economic way of seeing the world automatically creates shortage. [ … ] Shortage does not precede the economic communication. Shortage occurs as a result of the binary division of the world into have/have not by the economic code; which, moreover, produces the possibility of economising on the scarce resources whether these be money or as translated into other problems of shortage such as a shortage of competency, shortage of food, shortage of oil, etc.
“Polyphonic Organizations”, Niels Aakerstroem Andersen, in “Autopoietic Organization Theory”, pp156-7, Tore Bakken and Tor Hernes (editors).

Not only at the pragmatic level of crops ruined by intruders, pests or weather anomalies must surplus be a scarce thing we economize the distribution of, but, more subtly and more importantly, our product is scarce because we are now ‘at war’ with a nature we are trying to manipulate to our ends, to force into our service. Nature is no longer a partner, or a seamless extension of what we are; it is Not-Self, mercurial, deceptive, capricious. This fundamental perception-shift—most likely engendered accidentally by idle experimentation—gives rise to the perception of scarcity. Scarcity means we no longer have faith in nature’s bounty, no longer passively accept death and disease, now we want to live forever, cheat death, are fearful, untrusting. We begin to escape, to Ascend, to rise to the stars, to become gods over Earth, are even made in God’s image, born to be Masters of All. To fulfil our destiny we must control unwanted and wanted variables, generate less of the former and more of the latter; we must control everything so that Bad Things don’t happen to us. To control everything we have to own Not-Self, subjugate it to our wills, make it obey us, force it to deliver only the Good Stuff, then fight off the Bad Stuff and all other Enemies, and Ascend. (And what is the state but a monopoly on force protecting private property? What is market but a mechanism for exchanging the private property the state sanctions? One system, ascending, growing, destroying.)

But nothing makes sense in isolation. There is no separate place to ascend to. There is no such thing as Only Good. Diversity is the stuff of life, ‘control’ of it is death, or anathema; diversity controlled is not diversity at all, rather its Frankenstein. Don’t we see this lifeless monster today in the pallid, monotonous, characterless blitz of glamour, glitter and bling that is supposed to be what we want? But we don’t want an anodyne, prescribed-from-on-high cornucopia of shiny consumer goods, totally clean and safe, ‘risk free,’ all disease eradicated, an endless selection of junk to choose in malls which are as close to Hell as any other banal ‘evil’ I can think of. We want an authentic, risky, enriching, meaningful life, and we are waking up to this in our millions.

Back to property:

In that it is obviously about the illusion of control it is illogical.

In that it is about fear and self-protection at the cost of others (zero sum) it is dangerous, seen over the long term; this fear of uncertainty, perversely, generates belief in infinite growth.

In that property has at its conceptual heart “disposal,” it is destructive at its root, and requires ongoing violence to be sustained.

And that the system of exchange underpinning property’s very meaning and existence deploys an ‘unownable’ medium (money), property is a non-thing, a fantasy, a cultural blind spot. Money, the root of property, is a nothing, a mere measuring unit doubling as a claim on unpurchased wealth. And wealth only makes sense in a broader context.

Nevertheless I do not preach the abolition of property. Maybe we naked apes can mature beyond it, learn together how to distribute the fruits of our peculiar genius in a less destructive way; I certainly hope for this outcome. But we have to earn such a new wisdom. Forced abolition on an indignant wave of rage cannot work for long; only an evolution of consciousness can generate the right cultural conditions for transcending that which is dying. In the meantime, we owe it to ourselves to understand as well as we can the system breaking down all around us. For only an informed pubic can select the wiser options. Since the system is the problem, it is outside its remit and paradigm that those wiser options are to be found and created. Look there where the mainstream is not shining its glittering lights, and we'll find each other well enough.

Money is a Jealous God

2011-11-13T03:00:00.000-08:00

We have made a god of money.

Money is a symbol of the agreement (we somehow) reached, that a number attached to some sign ($, £, €) accurately denotes the value of a thing. It is a ‘natural’ idea to us now, something we accept unquestioningly, but imagine explaining to a !Kung bushman that his loin cloth is ‘worth’ $50 on the ‘open market.’ What is a dollar? How much is one worth? What does it mean to measure the value of a thing with a simple number attached symbol? Can you even explain it to yourself? What is the dollar value of your right hand, to you? To the market? To me?

We have made of god of money, and we are not allowed to question that god.

In Hindu religious art, the eyes of the gods are whited out. We mortals cannot look at them and live. Money is like that. It is like the smell of your nose, there always, intimately familiar, and yet totally indescribable. After we have penetrated money’s mists and seen the vacuum that lies beyond them, we are changed. The old person ‘dies,’ the new one sees the world in a very different light.

What is the value of a loin cloth? What is $50? What information in “loin cloth” cannot be contained by the information “$50”? How about the following guess at the value of a loin cloth:

O snug second scrotum,
o status of my manhood,
o evidence of:
my skill with a blade,
to track all day then kill clean,
to skin and cure, to share the meat,
to make from what I have what I need!
How could I ever want another’s!?

That’s 47 words. Have I just valued the loin cloth at W47? Stupid question. What if I had put it to music? Or painted an image of my loin cloth on a cave wall? Words, music and images work together. They cooperate, expand on, go beyond. There is grammar, context, rhythm, style, rhyme, tone, colour, culture, etc. But $50 is always and only $50.

Why is it that the consensus required to create money—this ‘somehow’ agreement reached as if by magic, that $1 is always and only $1—is so powerful? To my mind it is precisely by magic we have concocted equivalence from its absence elsewhere in nature. If you can, try to name two things that grow or emerge from Universe, even two apples or grains of sand, that are exactly identical. Even two protons proceed through a different trajectory, have different ‘destinies.’ No two Decembers are identical, no two experienced seconds, or smiles, holidays, Mondays ... nothing. Everything is unique and in a constant state of flux. Only measuring-units such as inches, miles, meters and money posses this quality of perfect equivalence.

Why then have we made a jealous god of money, but not of inches or ounces?

The more of us capable of answering that question, in depth, the better chance humanity has at making it through the coming challenges.

A Crisis of Imagination

2011-11-11T00:27:00.000-08:00

At the supermarket buying a loaf of bread and a jar of yoghurt, I saw a German newspaper (Die Zeit) sporting the headline, “What is the alternative to capitalism?” Underneath, dominating the front page, was an appropriate graphic of a big fish eating a smaller fish eating a smaller fish, maybe five fish long. It’s a graphical gesture we all understand. Sadly, the article does not appear to be available online, so, not having bought a copy of the paper, I cannot comment on its content.

A couple of weeks ago, on a mainstream German channel (ARD), Franz Hoermann was allowed his five minutes of fame (his star appears to be rising though, so perhaps more than five minutes are coming his way). In his rapid-fire, academic style, he described the fiat, fractional reserve system. There appeared to be no shock in the audience. The minister for the economy, Philipp Roesler, sat to Hoermann’s left. Next to Roesler sat the finance minister and one of the architects of the Euro, Theo Waigel. Opposite Hoermann sat some markets expert, Dirk Mueller. Of the quartet, only Waigel seemed content to propagate the idea that the money system is fine as it is, is somehow immortal, and needs no substantial adjustments. That a thinker of Hoermann’s oddity should be given any airtime at all on such a mainstream talk show is quite surprising, that the other panelists, and the host too, should (more or less) sympathize with his position (Waigel excepted) more surprising still.

Apparently the BBC (principally Radio 4 and Newsnight) are also broadcasting what I think of as the voice of reason, that is, the type prepared to highlight collapse. Not doom and gloom necessarily, but a deep systemic problem which must be addressed. The Guardian online yesterday morning had a headline in its business section proclaiming the European situation was spiraling out of control, that France and Germany were contemplating a restructuring of the Eurozone. Strange days, as they say, are most certainly afoot. And yet despite this media flurry, a combination of rigged markets, desperate belief, a few heads of state tumbling down the career ladder, some reshuffling, and the situation suddenly seems less desperate. For a while. Nevertheless the taste of profound change in the air can’t be ignored any more. Defenses are crumbling, and I suspect growing numbers of the so-called elite are losing heart. Fewer and fewer of us care about this system as we once did, fewer desire ever growing consumption, ever higher salaries, an ever more frenetic rat race. What’s the point? To be cliched about it, surely there’s more to life than this!

So, is capitalism doomed? Well of course it is, just as is the sun. Only sooner. But it’s the wrong question (sort of).

I’ve covered this topic before, probably too often, so am going to be brief here. What I want to say is that what is being called into question, although labelled “capitalism” by everyone and their aunt, is in fact the price system, and includes the variants of socialism, communism, and fascism humanity has toyed with thus far, though these systems do have important differences.

A price is a piece of information generated by market activity (supply and demand) that tells us—allegedly in an uninfluenced, non-political, ‘value free’ way—what each good and service is worth. Price is therefore Value. Price information as generated by the market is—in ‘free’ market ideology—always true and accurate, as long as the State does not interfere with Price Discovery. Any interference muddies the water, poisons the accuracy of the information, and things no longer work optimally. It’s an elegant and powerful idea. Something organic and ‘natural’ takes place, constantly, no one dominates, and clear, helpful information emerges from the melee, information that guides important matters like how many Ferraris to manufacture, how many potatoes to grow, how many twenty carat diamond rings to produce, and so on. And via the labour market, who gets what amount of purchasing power is similarly discovered, in a ‘value free’ way. If only it were that simple!

As readers of this blog will know, I don’t subscribe to this theory (as it stands), since there can be no such thing as a ‘free’ market. Hence the price system cannot work as advertised. Hence ‘capitalism’ cannot work as advertised. The differences between ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’ are important, but also somewhat cosmetic. In communism we have the monopoly of State fixing prices. In capitalism we have the monopoly (or oligopoly) or the Corporation fixing prices. Either way we do not have clean and true information contained in prices. Externalities are but one other aspect of this general problem. That we even try to nail value down using a linear scale like Dollar is another.

There are many problems, but perhaps the central one is that the confected dichotomy between Market and State serves no purpose other than to bamboozle and confuse. It is a Punch and Judy show, just as the Left-Right Drama is. One telling sign of this is the infrequency with which lobbying (the modern name for bribery) is discussed as Market interference in State. If Market only works best when ‘free’ from State ‘interference,’ why do we not hear any mainstream discussion of how a ‘free’ State works best when free from Market ‘interference?’

Of course the answer is that the price system is corruptible, corrupted, and benefits approximately 10% of the population at the cost of the remaining 90%. It is an elitist system by design. And that applies to both Market and State. Elitism, entrenched class divisions, wealth, health and education gaps, are systemic properties of the price system while the money system is set up as we have it.

Underneath all of this writhe, like uroboric world serpents, the core assumptions of Competition, Selfishness and Greed, as projected onto nature via misunderstandings of Darwinian theory (Spencer’s “red in tooth and claw”). Of course a millennia old dynamic of elitist control of an exploited non-elite, as established by the state long ago (a HUGE topic), predominantly engenders the kind of competition, selfishness and greed history has delivered thus far. We cooked ourselves in that soup and now see its flavours everywhere we look, even in our imagination. That there is far more to nature than this simplistic Triumvirate of Evil is becoming plainer and plainer, but changing the system forged in those elitist fires, the system which found form and life in historical processes set in motion by farming and ‘taming’ fire, and as these accomplishments gave birth to scarcity and property (twinned phenomena in my humble opinion) which in turn shape our view of All That is; changing a system that old, that much a part of what we all are, is no easy task.

Back to the price system. As we can see, its roots go deep indeed. We ‘need’ it, because we have ‘discovered’ scarcity via farming and property. Because there is not enough to go around, what better way to ‘decide’ who gets what, while keeping the constant threat of a Hobbesian Warre of Each Against All at bay, what better than some ‘anonymous,’ impartial, and incorruptible system? Capitalism. Free Market. The Price System. A force of nature for harnessing our brutish forces of nature.

Cool, only atop the foundational assumption of scarcity no market can stay free. Big fish eat little fish (competition, greed, selfishness), in the twinned realms of Market and State alike, and before you know it, the biggest are writing the rules to suit themselves and their own. ‘Twas ever thus, and ever thus shall be. Until we update the Triumvirate of Evil and embrace abundance, cooperation and faith.

Back to the money system. It is the motor of state apparatus, is its core dynamic embodied in financial infrastructure. Forged in those Competition, Selfishness and Greed fires, the money system stimulates and assumes these three forces equally resolutely. It also requires, by design, perpetual economic growth. Ever-growing economic activity. An ever-expanding money realm into the non-economic realm. An ever-accelerating rat race. What was once done for free, what is ‘idly’ doing nothing—like forests and schools of fish—must be converted into either goods or services. If it’s not working, if it’s not earning money and delivering price information, what possible value can it have? How can we measure a thing, assess it, extract it, profit from it, unless it is sucked into economic life? Look at air, that useless, ubiquitous stuff. It has a price of zero! Let’s earn money from it, put it to work somehow, make it earn its right to exist! But what happens when there’s no nature left to convert into goods and services ??? Let’s not contemplate that.

Except, the mainstream has begun to contemplate just that. We are the mainstream, even we Fringe Nutjobs. The more eloquent we become at presenting our case, the quicker and more effectively the message can spread to others. Then our imaginations can begin the work of envisioning a new system, and put ideas into practice.

Fellow travelers, through this period of upheaval, crisis and opportunity, the time of the Fringe Nutjob has come. People will be asking, in growing numbers, what the alternatives are. Sadly, the “no one knows” answer can be annoying. I suggest pointing out that the system we have is based on profound misunderstandings of the workings of reality, and, as a consequence, has become addicted to perpetual growth. We have designed a system which, were it a car, could only accelerate. Forever. Pressing on the breaks causes it to crash. Designing things differently requires, urgently, a new money system, which will further and necessarily require a redesign of pretty much everything else. All of it can only begin when we are ready to initiate the task. When we badly want something new. Right now recognition of the urgency is paramount. The ideas are there. We need safe-as-possible mechanisms and methodologies for testing them.

It has begun in earnest. Now we have to kick our imaginations into gear, have a lot of faith, and believe in ourselves.

(After reading this please check out this talk, given towards the end of October at Occupy Wall Street, on money, value and information flow. Fascinating stuff. Thanks, Karl, for the link.)

Has Money Become Obsolete?

2011-11-03T01:24:00.000-07:00

This is a Le Monde article translated by Al Evans, which I found at Charles Eisenstein's blog. Enjoy.

By Anselm Jappe

The media and official sources are preparing us: in the next few months, maybe even the next few weeks, a new worldwide financial crisis will begin, and it will be worse than in 2008. Catastrophes and disasters are being openly discussed. But what will happen after? What will our lives be like if banks and public finances fail on a vast scale? Presently, all European and North American financial systems are in danger of going down together, with no possible savior.

But at what point will the stock-market crash stop being a news story for the media, and become an event we will notice out on the street? The answer: When money can no longer fulfill its usual function, either because it becomes scarce (deflation), or because it circulates in enormous, but devalued quantities (inflation). In either case, the circulation of goods and services slows, perhaps to a complete standstill. Their possessors will no longer find anyone who can pay them in “valid” money which permits them, in turn, to buy other goods and services. So they’ll keep what they have.

The stores will be full, but without customers; the factories will be in perfect operating condition, but with nobody working there; the teachers will no longer go to the schools, because they haven’t been paid in months. Then we will be made aware of a truth which is so obvious we didn’t notice it: there is no crisis in production itself. Productivity in all sectors is continuously increasing. The amount of arable soil available can feed the entire world population. The shops and factories can produce even more than is necessary, desirable, or even sustainable. The miseries of the world are not due, as they were in the Middle Ages, to natural catastrophes, but to a kind of “enchantment” that separates men and their products.

What is not working any more is the “interface” between men and what they produce, namely, money. The crisis confronts us with the fundamental paradox of capitalist society: The production of goods and services is not an end in itself, but only a means. The only true end is to multiply money, to invest one euro and get two back.

However, those who hold capitalist finance in contempt assure us that finance, credit, and the markets are only foreign growths on a healthy economic body. Once the bubble bursts, there will be turbulence and bankruptcies, but in the end it will only be a “healthy” storm and we will begin again with a stronger, more real economy. Really? Today, we get almost everything by paying for it. If the supermarket, the electric company, the gas station, and the hospital accept only cash money, and if there isn’t much of it any more, we will soon be in distress. If there are enough of us, we can still take the supermarket by assault, or connect ourselves directly to the electrical network.

But when the supermarket is no longer resupplied, and the electric plant stops running because it can’t pay its workers and suppliers, what then? Barter systems could be organized, new kinds of solidarity, direct exchanges. It would even be a good opportunity to renew social connections. But who can believe that we could accomplish this in a very brief time on a large scale, in the midst of chaos and looting? “We will go to the country,” say some, “to appropriate the raw materials directly.” Too bad the European Community has been paying peasants, for years, to cur down their trees, pull up their vines, and slaughter their livestock…. After the collapse of the countries of Eastern Europe, millions of people survived thanks to relatives who lived in the country and to kitchen gardens. Will we be able to say the same in France or Germany?

It is not certain that we will arrive at these extremes. But even a partial collapse of the financial system will have consequences due to the fact that we have given ourselves, hands and feet bound, to money, giving it the exclusive task of assuring the function of society. Money has existed since the dawn of history, we are told — but in pre-capitalist societies, it played only a marginal role. It is only the the last few decades that we have arrived at the point where almost every part of life involves money and where money has filtered even into the smallest hidden corners of individual and collective existence.

But money is only real when it represents some work that has actually been done and the value that this work has created. All other money is only a fiction, based only on the mutual agreement of the players, and confidence in this agreement could evaporate. We are witnessing a phenomenon not foreseen by economic science — not a crisis of a single kind of money and the economy it represents, to the advantage of another, stronger economy. The euro, the dollar, and the yen are all involved in a crisis. The few countries still rated AAA by the rating agencies cannot, by themselves, save the world economy. None of the proposed economic recipes is working, anywhere. The market functions as poorly as the state, austerity as poorly as stimulus, Keynesianism as poorly as monetarism.

Thus we are witnessing a devaluation of money as such, the loss of its role, its obsolescence. But not by the conscious decision of a humanity finally tired of what even Sophocles called the most ill-omened invention of mankind. It is rather by a process uncontrolled, chaotic, and extremely dangerous. It is like taking the wheelchair from someone after he has long been denied the natural use of his legs. Money is our fetish, a god we created ourselves, on which we believe ourselves dependent and whose anger we are ready to sacrifice anything to appease.

Nobody can honestly say he knows how to organize the lives of tens of millions of people when money loses its function. It would be good to at least admit the problem exists. Perhaps we should prepare ourselves for the age after money as for the age after oil.

Half Moon Force

2011-10-29T02:18:00.000-07:00

(For Scott Olsen)

It spills out forever, night, day.
Fingers spill to the wound

satellites, fireflies, the magic
of hot concern. Young man

sacked in silver light. Stun
the cut string of his collapse

into us, reach out from distant eyes.
The half moon bursts.

His brain swells. Comatose.
This asset to defend, this dividing line.

Gas burns, curls to eyes
tongues the message into corners

as markets rise on heat
their heart the magma of everything

that could possibly matter, the power
of the gun of fire

punched force forwards
forwards and forwards

arced at his brow now the blood grin dent
fingers slick in open moon

half of its self, half of us all
poison only. And heal.

What Is Capitalism, Exactly?

2011-10-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

Russia Today seems to be a news organization growing in presence and penetration. It is, of course, not without an agenda, but for now at least it covers stories of interest to the 99%—to use the modern vernacular—far better than the mainstream. I drop by from time to time and watch any articles that catch my eye. Last weekend a debate on #ows did just that. An early theme that emerged in the opening minutes was that America had yet to experience true capitalism, that Wall Street was not a capitalist phenomenon, that until we got true capitalism we’d just be digging a deeper debt-hole for ourselves, and the socialist rich would continue to fleece the 99% and charge them for the pleasure. Oh yeah, and growth would not return. It’s an argument I’m sure you’ve all heard before. And it begs one blindingly obvious question: What the hell is capitalism?

At risk of annoying those who want to know, I suspect there are as many answers as people chancing an answer. Which is I suppose good in some ways, but bad in others. However, if capitalism can be any number of things depending on whom you ask, the assertion that some pure or true capitalism would put America or Europe or the world Back in Business is vague and unprovable. Furthermore, if the world has never experienced True Capitalism, how can we know it would work? And, is it even tenable to assert that something as vague as capitalism has a ‘true’ form, and what does it mean for such to work? These are not easy questions to answer. In fact, there are no answers.

My position is vague too, I admit it, but—I dare to suggest—less vague. Whatever we call The New Way (I’m with those who refer to it as resource-based economics, but that’s totally cosmetic, little more than a temporary holder), we cannot know from this distance the details of its operating, which would be emergent and changing anyway. But a New Way it will most definitely be. What I do not seek is a ‘return’ to, or arrival at, some pure, ‘free’ market oiled by an optimally minimal amount of ‘government interference’, because such a wish makes absolutely no sense to me. Not only is there no separation between the fictions of Market and State, there is no such thing as freedom. Acceptance of this will set us ‘free’ (ha!) to build The New Way from the ground up. And so, from a fresher perspective, a free market is exactly what I wish for.

Deep in the Myth of the Market I spy the seed of something radical, and that is direct democracy and its potential flourishing via the Internet (or similar infrastructure and software). The very idea that everyone’s dollar is equivalent, has purchasing power and therefore ‘political’ power too; that none can steer the market to their own egomaniacal ends, is a healthy one. The problem with it, is that money is necessarily powerful, operates as a commodity with value even as it is a mere measure, and that being rich is ‘better’ than being poor.

Because outcomes cannot be equal, because people are not uniformly ‘rational,’ motivated and well informed, the messy and unpredictable competition of markets can only lead, in this system, to grossly unequal accumulations and distribution of money and property. Under the current rules of the market game ‘success’ is about victory over, or at the expense of, other market participants. Competition is nothing unless it produces winners and losers.

In this system, healthy unequal distribution (uniformity of outcome is flat out impossible) generates unhealthy and stubborn rich and poor divides. When, by definition, rich is Good, and poor is Bad, why should we expect a different result? There is a constant incentive to game this system for ego-based ends; the rich seek to maintain the current distribution or tilt it even more in their favour, the poor to Get Rich by any means possible. The power lies with the rich, however, since they can afford lawyers, lobbyists, the best education, etc., to help them and their kin stay ‘on top.’ And none of this has anything to do with blame, except at the systemic level. As humans with empathy and imagination, we can imagine what it’s like to be rich or poor, so seek the latter and avoid the former (as a rule) and set up systems that survive across generations. Hence stubborn rich-poor divides, class divisions, and so on.

So the ‘free’ market dynamic so many yearn for can only generate the very monopoly problem it is thought to avoid, while our foundational assumptions about reality include scarcity, Separation (as Charles Eisenstein means it), greed and competition, and denigrate, or think illusory, abundance, cooperation and trust.

"What," as Mr. Fussy was wont to say, "to do?"

Well, to be vague, in conjunction with a change of consciousness, we change the rules and goals of the game, by changing the money system to fit what the new consciousness desires, perceives, understands. Until we address the stickiness of money, its ability to glue divisions in place and keep them there at all costs, the Market-State hierarchical extraction dynamic will operate as we have seen historically thus far, turning ‘idle’ resources into goods and services for sale at an ever accelerating pace, to the enrichment of the 1% (10% really), recently as aided and abetted by fossil fuels and our burgeoning technological prowess. Furthermore, exacerbating the problem of what I’m calling money’s stickiness is the usury attached to its creation per fractional reserve banking, such that the money system must constantly increase the money supply if it is to pay off the interest owed, which requires a forever growing economy. Consequently, growth is what ‘backs’ money in this system, hence our blind allegiance to the god Perpetual Growth, and our systemic subservience to it. We are witnessing today the system’s breakdown, for the simple reason that growth cannot be reignited as the system demands.

The money system is a problem generated by a consciousness (or paradigm) of scarcity, fear and greed. They reenforce one another, co-create each other in a positive feedback loop, and we are still in their (its) grip. But we are breaking out of it at last. There are multiple suggestions ‘out there’ to help us grow a new system from the soil of the new, emerging consciousness.

The Venus Project and The Zeitgeist Movement call for a new socioeconomics which would render redundant the need for any medium of exchange, but are sketchy to silent on how to transition to such a different system. Their idea to give away goods and services at a price of zero, to all people, by producing more than enough across the planet, is beautiful, but too outlandish and far-off to find sufficiently deep purchase in the current culture’s soil, as evidenced by The Venus Project’s relative obscurity after decades of dedicated promotion and campaigning. The Zeitgeist Movement is concerned primarily (and rightly so in my opinion) with dissemination of information and analyses which help others more critically appraise the status quo so as to be readier for change when it comes, and more able to introduce it wisely.

Charles Eisenstein calls for the buying of existing debt with a fiat, negative interest currency, not debt-based; the end of income taxes, and the introduction of biting taxes on environmentally damaging mining, manufacture etc.; a social dividend ‘funded’ by that money drained from the economy via the demurrage rate and environmental taxes; for minimal (or no) private property, maximum commons, revolution in the education system; and multiple money types to meet flexibly various economic needs. It’s all laid out in his book, “Sacred Economics”.

Franz Hoermann and his ‘team’ call for a minimum of two “billing circuits”, such that matter (as mined, farmed, grown, etc.) is to be ‘tracked’ by one type of money, and human creativity (labour and other societal contributions) by another. ‘Money’ is to be totally electronic and transparent, created (as in Ithaca Hours) at the point of the transaction, which means locally at the level of the individual, managed by an Internet-like infrastructure, and to be seen as a means of keeping tabs rather than as wealth. In this ‘plan’ (better; set of ideas and suggestions) there is to be a social dividend in the form of an ‘overdraft facility’ at the level of the personal ‘bank account,’ which incurs no interest. There is no interest anywhere in the money system. Bankers become advisers to people seeking help on the best way to contribute to society. Private property would likewise (as in Eisenstein’s model) be phased out. Education would be a far more open affair. (Further details on this are available on YouTube in German, or at this blog as translated by me.)

There are many other ‘plans’ out there, from Freegold, to 100% reserve banking, to MMT. My ‘money’ is on some mix of the above.

But change is underway now, globally, in the form of Occupy Everywhere, which is the early beginnings of the creation of a new decision-making sociopolitical apparatus, which will mature and develop as it does, beyond the control of any individual or monopoly. As such it is a genuinely ‘free’ market (to the extent such a thing is at all possible) because it is motivated by transparency and cooperation, which has The New Way both as its goal and means (means are ends). The establishment of these means is to include the contribution of anyone who wishes to be involved. In this ‘market,’ this bazaar, the ideas and suggestions humanity has to offer can be discussed and critiqued, including how to get direct democracy up and running, scaling that up beyond the local, and slowly building the mechanisms which will transcend the current status quo, and render it redundant. If some people want to call this process True Capitalism, they can. Who am I to say no to that. My contribution (or desire) is adherence to a transparent and cooperative process which allows the stronger ideas to rise to the surface of human consciousness, globally. Science, feedback from nature, open-mindedness and concern for the environment will take care of the rest.

The earth belongs to no one. No one. Life (or Universe) is a web of ever-changing interrelationships which cannot be frozen into some ‘preferred’ arrangement, and includes humanity as deeply as it includes asteroids and weather. Humans are not separate from Universe. Existing ‘rulers’ only rule over others for as long as those others agree to that rule. Law, convention, tradition; all are negotiable, and being human inventions steeped in inescapable ignorance, need to be treated with a wise but cool attitude which allows us creative flexibility going forward. I agree with those who see an enormous sea change sweeping across the human sphere, that our consciousness is reaching out to a deepening appreciation of cooperation, interdependence, emergence, embeddedness and community. These ‘new’ desires can find no fruitful voice in this system of Perpetual Growth, consumerism, cynicism, propaganda and hierarchical ‘control.’ In the manner of autopoiesis (self-creating) we, the 100%, are giving birth to the soil that will nourish their flourishing, regardless of the label we choose to attach to what one day emerges as Our New System. What it will not be is the flowering of the neoliberal dream of homo economicus, locked into guarded competition with the rest of Universe in a battle over scarce goods and services, whose cost is the endless rape of nature in pursuit of the barren dream of Shiny Cars, Huge McMansions and other Bling Mirages.

So, my answer to the question I set myself in the title: I don’t care. It’s not history or some pragmatic, academic purity which should be guiding us, but our humanity and its embeddedness in the rest of nature. Chris Hedges:

Macdonald argued that those who wanted change had to base all actions on the nonhistorical and more esoteric values of truth, justice and love. They had to retain Danton’s call for audacity. Once any class bows to the practical dictates required by effective statecraft and legislation, as well as the call to protect the nation, it loses its moral authority and its voice. The naive belief in human progress through science, technology and mass production, which this movement understands is a lie, erodes these nonhistorical values by placing faith in state power and fantasy. The choice is between serving human beings or serving history, between thinking ethically or thinking strategically. Macdonald excoriated Marxists for the same reason he excoriated the liberal class: They subordinated ethics to another goal. They believed the ends justified the means. The liberal class, like the Marxists, by serving history and power capitulated to the state in the end. This capitulation by the liberal class, as Irving Howe noted, “bleached out all political tendencies.” Liberalism, he wrote, “becomes a loose shelter, a poncho rather than a program; to call oneself a liberal one doesn’t really have to believe in anything.”

Believe in us, and call yourself a human.

#ows Gets Down to Business

2011-10-22T00:48:00.000-07:00

I am curious to how "Justine" is still part of this movement after robbing the poor so she can become richer, isn't this one of the biggest issues we our standing together in solidarity with !!!!!!!!!!! She is just completely out of line, has she been exposed for doing this yet ?
Source

You did not get consensus approval for your website. You did not go through the procedures every other working group went through. You announce online a list of demands without approval of a group who has put everything in their lives on the line to create a global movement in solidarity. A group who has made it abundantly clear that there IS NO LIST OF DEMANDS. I ask of you Michael. How Dare You?
Source

WHEREAS THE FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION PROVIDES THAT:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

BE IT RESOLVED THAT:
WE, THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF THE PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in order to form a more perfect Union, by, for and of the PEOPLE, shall elect and convene a NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY beginning on July 4, 2012 in the City Of Philadelphia.
Source

#ows’ goals couldn’t be more ambitious, and the methodology—reaching consensus via direct democracy—about as untried and frustrating a means as one could select. And growing up in total transparency, in view of anyone who cares to look. However, the means are the ends, the journey is the destination. To do something new we first have to be the change we seek. Making demands of the existing status quo is not going to produce change, just minimal cosmetic adjustments to grease the squeaky wheels. That is, if the starting point, the driving fuel of the movement, is the recognition that the system is broken at its foundation, appealing to that system with a list of demands makes no sense at all. Such would be idiocy. The only road worth building is the hard road. And, though the pressure is immense and the situation dire enough to have inspired people to this bold action, this path cannot be rushed. It will take time. Lots of time.

Of course there will be frustrations. The tension has only just begun. No doubt things will get far worse, despair and despondency will have to be fought again and again if long term momentum is to be maintained. And there is no guarantee of success. The goal is nothing less than a profound reorientation of society at the global scale. Just typing that sentence makes me feel foolish, but, seeing as I believe exactly this is needed, shying from the enormity of the challenge isn’t going to help me, or anyone else for that matter. Hence, my respect for the movement is enormous, and I wish them all good fortune and strength. Any person or group putting their money where their mouth is on a project of this size, and doing so with clarity and grace, deserves our admiration.

The above-quoted preamble to the unauthorized proposals is bold indeed. As I read the document's demands I couldn’t help smiling at its temerity. Yet as the they unfolded I became more and more disappointed. And there’s the deeper, deepest, trickiest rub. Even a secessionist advocacy is unsatisfying, doesn’t go far enough in my opinion. In my opinion. How many share my opinion? One thousandth of one percent? Fewer?

When I got to work yesterday, I realised the intractability of the situation is almost overwhelming. A metaphor Charles Eisenstein likes to use is that of pregnancy and birth. In this metaphor, humanity is about to be born into a new arrangement, a new paradigm. We have reached the maximum of what the current paradigm can possibly create. There’s no space left in the womb of the old. We have been sustained by its nourishing beyond what it can healthily do for us. The pressure to escape crushes, yet the way out is hidden. The new environment we are about to be born into is necessarily unknowable. And we can’t go back, even if we wanted to. We feel trapped, suffocated, hopeless, even as we feel compelled to do something, go somewhere. But where?

Precisely because we cannot know, there must be millions of different opinions about what we ought to do. All each of us can offer the unknown soil of our invisible future is the best of what we are, with no guarantee that our position, our heart, our vision or rage or hope, will meet open hearts and minds. Yet for those of us who feel we have to try, we try in the face of this. This is our fool’s courage. We add our voice to the cacophony again and again. But we can steer nothing to our ego’s ends. And nor should we. It’s up to all of us, not one of us.

I’ve spent a long time over recent months contemplating hierarchy and anarchy, and have almost reached the (flexible) conclusion that this so-called dichotomy is a red herring (as most dichotomies are). What is demanded of us is self-education aligned with a humble readiness to be corrected by events and new information, to be tuned by what gradually emerges from the cacophony of collapse as The New Song, as it finds melody and rhythm, with our contribution in its theme.

Self-education is vital not because of its anarchic connotations, but simply because trust is gone; whom can we trust today? Who is without an agenda? No one. The only wise reaction to such a state of affairs is what we might call ‘humble arrogance,’ that is; to wise up interactively while staying true to the uniqueness each of us is, while accepting that of others. It is not an easy path to walk, but I believe we all have to walk it, and knowingly. It’s not that hierarchy is better or worse than anarchy, it’s that what we now create together must involve as many people as possible at the level of deep comprehension and contribution. Weave some new tale from humanity’s accumulated wisdom, transparent, replenishing, fecund and mysterious.

That ought to do it.

#ows, Sovereignty, and the Individual

2011-10-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

Like millions of others I’ve been following the #ows and Occupy Everywhere movement grow in numbers and support (Maju has a great post up at his blog). What is most heartening for me, at least for now, is how robust the core desire of the movement appears to be. The ambition to redesign democracy from the ground up is hardly timid, and even if foolhardy—in that the enormity of the task is unimaginable—my sense is that it is precisely at this depth we must begin. All power to those who act so bravely and generously on the awareness that it is up to us, we naked apes, to restore our dignity and honour. No doubt this sounds overly dramatic to many, yet I would go so far as to add that this is humanity’s darkest hour, that if we don’t recognize the gravity of our situation soon, it will be the end of our chance at true civilizational progress.

What I want to ponder in this post, albeit briefly, is what it means for a system to be alive. Yes, that enormous old chestnut, ‘What is life?’ I feel this to be of central importance to what it means to believe in the sovereignty of the individual, to what selfishness and agency are, and what ‘earning a living’ means. For how can anyone claim to deserve either punishment or reward if there is no individual? And what is private property if the individual disappears? Discussing the phenomena of life as a process, a dynamic, an emergent, complex property of certain systems is key to this age old debate. Of course a blog post can only be a gentle introduction to such an enormous topic, but this is one intellectual battleground that will become more important as time goes on, so the more of us acquainting ourselves with the meat and potatoes of this debate, the better. (I don’t do predictions often, but yes, this is one. Suck it up, bitchez!)

According to my daughter’s school biology text book, an entity is said to be alive when it fulfils the criteria denoted by the acronym RINGER:

Replication
Irritability
self-Nourishment
Growth and development
Egestion
Respiration

I find this too limiting a definition, too ‘biological’ or ‘matter-biased’, as do many others, which a look at Wiki’s page on living systems quickly demonstrates. As an old Star Trek fan I remember an episode of Next Generation in which Data’s right to be thought of as alive was discussed (for the uninitiated, Data is an android) . “I, Robot” covers similar ground, and there are many other similar explorations in literature and philosophy of course. However, the kind of living system I have in my sights here is a social system, such as a corporation or governmental organization.

What got me thinking about this was the YouTube video of the arrest of a woman outside a Citi Bank branch for closing her account (she was one of many, but the others had already been locked inside the branch). After my anger at the bank’s and police’s inelegant and panicked handling of the issue subsided, I started thinking about what one particular officer in a lower ranking blue shirt, with many cuffs dangling from his belt, rocking nervously on his feet in an aggressive-defensive posture, wielding his truncheon uncertainly as he protects the bank from the assembled crowd (about 2:20 on, right at the end of this short but compelling video). What was he thinking? Or, better, what was he feeling and experiencing for those few, hot seconds?

One thing is clear. The man is as much a human as any one of us. He has a job as many others do. His job is part of his totality, but only a part. Perhaps another ‘part’ of him sympathizes with those who claim to be “The 99%”. Yet in his role as policeman he must (at least while he thinks this way) put aside one part of his humanity in the interests of … What, exactly? I would say, in the interests of a living system we’ll call Police Force. Police Force trained him to become a Policeman, and when he’s in his uniform on the job he is a ‘different’ person to when he is on the couching watching TV. Why? Why do our behaviours change according to the hat we have on our head?

In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted a number of experiments on obedience, inspired by the question of the morality of Nazis such as Eichmann, as well as their underlings. What does it mean to be obedient if such results in our killing others? Milgram’s experiments involved three people: an actor posing secretly as a participant, a genuine participant, and a ‘scientist.’ The two participants were allotted the roles of teacher and learner, apparently randomly, but it was previously ensured that the actor always became the learner. The learner (actor) was then wired to an electric shock machine, and told to push buttons in answer to questions put to him/her by the teacher. The actor made plain that he/she had a heart condition. If the learner pushed the wrong button, the teacher was to punish him/her with an electric shock. Milgram wanted to find out how severe an electric shock the teacher would administer in the interests of ‘science.’ “He found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, 61–66 percent, regardless of time or place.” There are many experiments like this, and all yield, I suspect, similar results. That they are disturbing is because, in my view, we falsely think of ourselves as potent or sovereign individuals independently deciding on matters of right and wrong, correctly assessing situations ‘out there’ and acting accordingly in constant demonstration of our free will.

Are we discreet individuals in control of our lives, or are we emergent subsystems of larger subsystems in which we find form, definition and meaning in an ongoing and ever-changing way? What would your ideas about reality be like if you had been born deaf and blind? If we took identical twins at birth, raised one in a rich household in New York, but deposited the other with the Pirahã, how similarly would they turn out? If we then collected the Pirahã-twin twenty years later and brought it to New York to meet its identical sibling, how much would they have in common? How much about New York would the Pirahã-twin understand? If we deposited the twenty year old New York-twin with the Pirahã, how well would it function in that alien environment?

We will never know the thousands of reasons why the man shifting defensively on his feet outside Citi Bank became a policeman. If we asked, perhaps he’d tell us he freely chose the job. Could he have? Why not arrow-head maker? Or shepherd? Or poet? Or brain surgeon? How happy was he at school? How good a school was it? How ‘effective’ were his parents at raising him? Which of these many early conditions did he choose? Did he choose his body? Does such a question make any sense at all? When do we start being able to choose ‘freely?’ Certainly not where or to whom we are born. Nor the language our parents speak to us, nor how they communicate, their interests, sensibilities, passions, failings and strengths. Nor the television we are exposed to, nor the foods we are fed (though taste and screaming play a role here!). I’m not pushing the tabula rasa position of John Locke; I believe we are all born with a certain ‘stuff-mix’, a unique biological-social-familial-spacetime set that means we will remain unique forever. And we react uniquely to stimuli even though we have no ‘choice’ in the matter. We are not born blank slates, nor do we ‘begin’ at birth, and yet we are never ‘free.’ It is a non sequitur to point to uniqueness as evidence of free will.

So the policeman of this brief inquiry is a subsystem of a social organism called Police Force. The degree to which he is able to be ‘objective’ about this fact; that is, his loyalty to both his role and the oath he took upon becoming a policeman, is dependent upon millions of other factors we can never know about. For example, I am writing this article because of Universe as it has been through me up till now. As Charles Eisenstein puts it, I am Universe TobyRusselling. I am an unfolding verb, and so are you. Whether or not we see nobility in this or that part of Universe is a matter of perception, and all our perceptions are reactions we don’t control, as our reactions to what we perceive are beyond our control. Whether or not the policeman feels he acted nobly by virtue of staying true to his job is not as important as that we all tend to be true to our conditioning, as Milgram’s experiments show. And of course the minority who refrained from issuing the killing dosage were conditioned by their pasts to be less influenced by authority, less obedient, more critical of their situation.

As part of a nation, of a family, of a school and classes within a school, as child, sibling, father, mother, friend and employee, we are constantly influenced by ideas and other communications in various contexts; everything that we imbibe, not only as it comes to us from ‘the outside,’ but also as it exists in us in our own unique context, as we continually re-experience our ‘inner’ world of memories and senses and thoughts, we passively integrate into what we are becoming, passively generating associations, forming habits and addictions, likes and dislikes. This is what we are always becoming. We are not sovereign; it only seems that way because we can convince ourselves it is so. An idea-infrastructure is available to us with which we can create this impression. A human raised by dogs for long enough will never be able to comprehend the idea of individual sovereignty, for example.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Police Force is also a living system influenced by its environmental conditions, came into existence for certain reasons, and evolves over time in constant adjustments to unstoppable change. It, as we do, seeks to live on. In that it is what it does, and what it does is policing, it must police if it is to ‘survive.’ Furthermore, Police Force is a subsystem of State. State is also a living system which is what it does (extract the ‘foods’ it needs and ‘wants’ from its environment via exploitation of its citizens and other resources, in a hierarchical format), and seeks too to carrying on ‘living’ indefinitely. (And all this without even looking at issues of wages, money and debt, which are concepts, or communications, developed and evolved by culture and society.)

Niklas Luhmann posits that social systems consist of communications, and that the ‘soil’ from which they emerge are psychic systems (humans). Because we psychic systems find form in social systems, the interrelationship is obvious. Though notionally separate, in practice psychic and social systems cannot exist independently of one another. Even if we imagine a baby raised by wolves outside of human society, that psychic system is nevertheless embedded in a social system of communications consisting of barks, growls, snarls, smells and any other information produced by its environment, in my opinion including seasons, food, hunting, etc. Information is discernible difference, is anything we are capable of perceiving.

A large corporation emerges from the broader society of which it becomes a functioning subsystem. Ditto our Police Force. And as the cells of our bodies are living systems, so we humans act as cells of larger order social systems, from families to mutli-nationals. Our ‘obedience,’ or sense of belonging to those social systems we are part of depends on a multitude of factors I won’t even try to list. What I here publicly ponder, after having watched that video over and over again, is how the changes coursing through society as ideas that conflict with the existing paradigm of scarcity, greed and competition, are affecting people like the policeman here contemplated, or CEOs, or prime minisiters, presidents, and chancellors, and how they impact on social systems such as Police Force and Government. I don’t think I am saying anything controversial by stating they feel threatened.

Change is afoot at a scale and depth I suspect humanity has never remotely experienced before, yet the cultural equipment we have inherited to deal with this change finds itself in a defensive posture regarding that change. We are under an attack we must deal with using the cultural repertoire which is the very object of that attack. We each react differently, and likely we are all confused. That means Interesting Times Ahead, through which it is vital we remember, constantly, that we are all simultaneously ‘victims’ and ‘agents’ of reality, just as Police Force and Policeman. We are reality, as is everything else without exception. A wise mix of humility and confidence is therefore called for, which I fall far short of. My hope is that the efforts of those publicly closing bank accounts; those collecting in cities across the planet to teach themselves direct democracy; as well as those of us merely discussing, thinking and debating, find a constructive rhythm or cohesion towards a new direction thus far only minutely in evidence. If we are unable to keep this transition together to some useful degree, the centre will not hold and the subsequent, violent oscillations could destroy most of what humanity has built this far.

It's up to us, but by golly that doesn't mean it's going to be easy!

Economics is Economic Madness! Markets Buck Reality!

2011-10-08T01:01:00.000-07:00

I’m borrowing somewhat from The Slog’s recent post, though I had wanted to comment on the miraculous markets myself before I read his missive. Time and business elsewhere prevented me from doing so earlier, but I think Saturday is the better day for this my first ‘The Week That Was’ post.

Anyway, rating agencies have been slashing away merrily; Mervyn King has proclaimed the current crisis the worst in history; an IMF adviser is warning of imminent global financial meltdown; revolution is beginning in America, is underway in Greece, in Spain and elsewhere; relocating Tokyo has been mentioned as well as the possibility that all of Japan is becoming uninhabitable; JP Morgan lovingly donated multiple millions to the NYPD, who promptly arrested hundreds of oiks (of Occupy Wall Street fame) for being on a bridge, and yet the markets surged upwards:

Dow Jones

FTSE

DAX

The Slog wonders if traders are stupid. Toby wonders if traders (human ones anyway) have anything to do with this at all. It is clear to me—as far as clarity is possible amidst this mud-miasma of disinformation—that the markets are rigged, and have been for quite some time. This ‘All’s Well on the Western Front’ media massage [sic] is so obviously a panic measure by those who want and need this system to survive as is, come what may, is as deft and elegant as JP Morgan’s metropolitan largesse, we can only take market robustness as a sign of desperation and evidence of embedded and rampant criminality. The Powers That Be are losing their confidence, their touch is deserting them. But what can they actually do? The game is up. And ‘we’ are taking ‘their’ power from ‘them.’ (In the end there is only us. As we stop playing along with the elite/non-elite dichotomy and start growing up into direct democracy and political maturity, the 99% will become the 100%.)

The Occupy Wall Street movement isn’t even making any demands of Government, which is exactly as it should be. Why one earth should we demand anything of the criminals looting global wealth so psychopathically, other than to tell them to stop and move aside, join us, or be steamrollered by the turning tide of history? When demands are made, we will be making them of ourselves. We want a system that has human and environmental concern built in. It’s up to us all to build it. And it always has been.

Meanwhile, the respectable organisation the NEF (New Economics Foundation) has just published a book on money creation and the mechanics of the money system. Here is the first paragraph from the executive summary:

“There is widespread misunderstanding of how new money is created. This book examines the workings of the UK monetary system and concludes that the most useful description is that new money is created by commercial banks when they extend or create credit, either through making loans or buying existing assets. In creating credit, banks simultaneously create deposits in our bank accounts, which, to all intents and purposes, is money.”
New Economics Foundation

No one who regularly visits either this blog or others concerned with similar objectives will be surprised by the above quote, but I think we should remember it is still controversial that money is the plaything of commercial banks worldwide (with the exception perhaps of China), that the money system is purposefully shrouded in mystery, and that we are again being asked to pawn our children’s futures to protect the system, the commercial banks’ ‘right’ to continue the charade they have employed for centuries to enrich themselves at the expense of others. The only human response to this redoubled attack is rebellion. Anything less is an abdication of our humanity. If we relinquish our dignity, we have nothing of any real value to live for. Isn’t that exactly what we are waking up to?

In short, the fact that the deeper system is the problem is the idea which needs to be promoted most energetically. It is not until this is recognized and understood by a sizable and coherent minority of people across the planet that effective change can be begun in earnest. When the numbers of us able to disseminate this reality compassionately, wisely and artistically to any ready, willing and able to hear it, reaches 10% and above, the tipping point will be reached. Perhaps we are already there. What lies before us is keeping vital infrastructure healthy and operational—the Internet, food supply chains, energy delivery systems, hygiene, sanitation, water, etc.—and learning, day by day and decision by decision, how we want direct democracy to work. Some of us will have to stay in the current system for this to be possible, as contacts, moles, what have you, others will be at the forefront of the new.

There are no guarantees of success, nor can there be a clear idea of what success will mean. And yet, the very fact that this is even beginning, whatever the outcome, is a success already. Live or die, the richer life we all want begins with uncertain courage flickering to action in our hearts, then flows outwards from there. We all have a role to play.

On Elitisim and the Growth of the Ego

2011-10-05T04:05:00.000-07:00

“My littlest finger,” Rehoboam is reported to have said, “is thicker than my father’s loins.” Considering his Dad was Solomon this was quite the boast. Solomon had a way with the ladies, and, something of a poet myself, I’m pretty sure his sack-skills weren’t based on words alone. If you follow me.

Rehoboam was a Master of the Universe, a Mighty King. He took over from Solomon at a time when the Great Unwashed were moaning about some unfair tax burden. Being vastly superior to everyone around him, Rehoboam took council from a coterie of experts rather than talk to the plebeians directly, no doubt believing that Kings breathe a different air. Doing God’s Work requires a certain je ne sais quoi. Anyway, after long consultation his response to his people’s complaints was certainly kingly:

“Whereas my father laid upon you a heavy yoke, so shall I add tenfold thereto. Whereas my father chastised you with whips, so shall I chastise you with scorpions. For my littlest finger is thicker than my father’s loins; and your backs, which bent like reeds at my father’s touch, shall break like straws at my own touch.”

Nowadays we’d call this austerity. That it reads to the modern ear like the ravings of a psychopath isn’t perhaps as interesting as the refreshing absence of spin. Today a very similar message, in terms of the types of decision being reached, is delivered as if we were all in it together, as if Wall Street were suffering just like Mainstreet, that the burden is shared equally by elite and non-elite alike. Thus it is our contemporary Rehoboams who are truly terrifying, who have polished their statecraft to burnished and bewitching propaganda which they shape-shift with such adroitness, deliver into all minds so omnipotently, that we are lost in a glittering web of lies and half-truths from which ‘escape’ takes discipline, perseverance and time. And what is (deliberately) scarcer today for most of us than those precious things?

Elitism is as old as farming, perhaps even as the alpha-urge to shine, dominate, be the group’s ‘generous’ center. We could also say elitism is as old as the ego, though how old the ego is no one can really tell (it is not as old as homo sapiens sapiens, I suspect). What is increasingly clear to me is that the ascendancy of elitism is like the ascendancy of the ego, that sorter of data; that measurer; that perceiver of separation, distinction, boundaries; that arch deceiver and jealous defender of its throne. It is the ego which tells us, ‘more for me is less for you,’ though regal magnanimity can ameliorate the tensions and stresses generated by such an unfortunate ‘truth.’ And yes, science is the ego’s double-edged sword, humility buried deep in its hilt, the dangers and rewards of hubris glinting from its blade. But elitism has a lifespan just as everything else. Some of its flowers; perpetual growth, institutionalized hierarchy, extortion, dehumanization, are both the primary drivers of its ascent as well as the chief architects of its demise. Its demise is woven into the fabric of its power. Which brings us, somewhat tangentially, back to spin. Why do our leaders ‘need’ it?

Change. Since Rehoboam we’ve been changing. If Jamie Dimon spoke plainly and told everyone in a televised address to bow before him because his dick is bigger than his dad’s, he’d be out on his ear, pursued by the raucous laughter of the hoi polloi. Today our Glorious Leaders must stage manage the presentation of their obvious superiority more subtly than in days of yore; we don’t allow ourselves to think that way—not explicitly—anymore. It has become distasteful. The elitist dynamic is still transmitted, but more surreptitiously, via myth, advertising, body language, size of building, office space, desk size, salary, clothes, armies, police, etc. What with the end of slavery and child labour (sort of); the advent of sexual liberation, equal rights (sort of), and Rights generally, and other such social impulses inspired by centuries of striving towards egalitarianism and justice, modern humans now exist in a cultural web which requires a different manner of leadership, no matter how elitist at heart, no matter how jointly responsible our leadership has been in bringing this about. Our leaders still operate in plain sight, yes, but not so honestly as before. Honesty would be the death of them (as it was, in a way, of Rehoboam). So the very ‘tools’ for propagating their message, manipulating and subjugating us to docility via bland educations and careers and consumerism, are also those with which ‘The People’ learn about each other, about Rights, ‘equality,’ the money system, justice, and the nature of reality as we uncover and re-interpret it via science. And this is part of what I mean when I say there is no such thing as control. Events spiral off in unknowable directions, even from our best laid plans. As the ego has designed its ascent so has it ensured its downfall. One begets the other.

And yet the future will not be ego-free—at least, I don’t think it will be. Because life is richly diverse and develops in ways we cannot foresee, there will be wide differences of success and failure, forever. Equality is an impossibility. Demanding it is an act of violence against nature, even though the urge to implement it socioeconomically is part of nature. As humans with egos capable of the self-deception of separation and Cartesian Duality, we can indeed struggle against inevitability, against ourselves as embodied by ‘elite’ versus ‘non-elite,’ even producing wonders as a result (though beauty is in the eye of the beholder), but equality can never be one of our successes. Should we manage to weather the coming storms, should something like Jacque Fresco’s resource-based economy take shape, it will mean only a shifting of the goal posts. Perhaps poverty will be vanquished, war too, but such accomplishments will shunt our experiences of success and failure into new domains; emotional, intellectual, technical, artistic, not necessarily measured by money or material possessions, nor necessarily as the sources of immature envy and class conflict, but as something new and unpredictable, unimaginable to us today.

If something like a resource-based economy includes direct democracy, flexible and wise adaptation to ongoing change, transparency and openness of all public endeavour, it will, I believe, be a far better world, regardless of the moral relativity one might detect in this post. For whatever freedom and debt are, I’m sure a more mature relationship with and understanding of both are within our collective reach. Our next maturation is tantalizingly close, yet light years away, and will evolve unevenly—there are no beginnings, no endings. Getting ‘there,’ as ever, will take time, discipline and perseverance, which each of us must win by fighting for them.

On Violence II

2011-10-03T02:30:00.000-07:00

It ain’t over yet. The issue I grapple with in this and the post which precedes it is complex. It has to do with the messiness of consensus. Even in a unit as small as a couple, even before we get to a family of three, consensus is often a battle. Of course there are happy moments of easy convergence, say to go to the movies rather than stay in, but as we all know, we each employ manipulation, bargaining, argument, reason and charm to get what we want at the cost of our partner or friend. That’s part of the glorious mess of human relationships, even with pets! Obviously, consensus among tens, hundreds or thousands of millions is quite a bit trickier.

I want to put this in some historical perspective. Class tensions and other conflicts at large social scales are as old as time.

The Hellenistic successor kingdoms established by Alexander’s generals, from Greece to India, employed mercenaries rather than national armies, but the story of Rome is, again, similar to that of Athens. Its early history, as recorded by official chroniclers like Livy, is one of continued struggles between patricians and plebeians, and of continual crises over debt. Periodically, these would lead to what were called moments of “the secession of the plebs,” when the commoners of the city abandoned their fields and workshops, camped outside, and threatened mass defection—an interesting halfway point between the popular revolts of Greece and the strategy of exodus typically in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Here, too, the patricians were ultimately faced with a decision: they could use agricultural loans to gradually turn the plebeian population into a class of bonded laborers on their estates, or they could accede to popular demands for debt protection, preserve a free peasantry, and employ the younger sons of free farm families as soldiers. As the prolonged history of crises, secessions, and reforms makes clear, the choice was made grudgingly. The plebs practically had to force the senatorial class to take the imperial option. Sill, they did, and over time they gradually presided over the establishment of a welfare system that recycled at least a share of the spoils to soldiers, veterans and their families.
David Graeber, “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”, p230

To my mind the dynamic touched on here by Graeber emerges because of the slow evolution of people into what they see as distinct groupings, the subsequent divergence of the evolution of these groups as a consequence of conflicting or opposing interests, which then leads to the dehumanization of ‘The Other’ to the extent that all manner of violence becomes commonplace and acceptable. Yet someone has to 'win'. Consensus is vital if there is to be any sort of constructive and joint endeavor. The question is, who benefits how from this consensus, how was it won, and how is it sustained? In state form (as a monopoly on force and ideology creation and interpretation), or otherwise?

In my view, chieftaincies are sufficiently different from states to warrant separate classification. The key diagnostic feature is fission. All political systems up to the time of the early state, have as part of their normal political and demographic processes, inherent tendencies to break and form smaller units across the landscape. [...] The state is a system which overcomes such fissiparous tendencies.
Ronald Cohen, “State Origins: A Reappraisal”, in “The Early State”, p35, Claessen and Skalník (editors). [My emphasis.]

To prevent the constant fission of groups a state apparatus emerges. Prevention of fission is of course only possible around some general consensus. The methodology of states across time and space is based on force, violence, propaganda and extraction. Being hierarchical states are about extraction of the non-elite in the interests of the elite, with sufficient welfare provisions allowed so as to prevent the type of fission that would be harmful to the elites. Since all history has not demonstrated cohesive consensus at large scale societal level in the absence of state apparatus, anarchism has a lot to prove. Nevertheless, the analyses of our modern predicament which have most convinced me are anarchistic, and I include here The Venus Project and The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM), though they would not describe themselves as anarchists. Nevertheless, any movement which calls for the break up of the state and party political governance is anarchistic at heart (the 'leader' being nature itself, which is self-evidently self-organizing). Although my knowledge of anarchism is that of an interested beginner, it is, it seems to me, Natural Law which both The Venus Project/TZM and anarchism refer to as guiding principles for governance. Both refer to the hubris of thinking The Market or Science can magic infinite growth on a finite planet, that supra-national corporations or other bodies such as the UN or IMF can operate above natural law, and so on.

However, We, The Human Race have never tried anything like globally connected anarchy. My own vision is of regional polities networked via Internet software/hardware cooperatively and openly managing or husbanding the earth’s resources. Getting there will be violent simply because the powers that be want to sustain the current status quo at pretty much all costs. No change as fundamental as required to transition to what I see as the next logical set up for humanity can happen, with as much invested in the current arrangement as there is, without violent upheaval. The current system also happens to be violent to its core. All this is quite uncontroversial.

But what about thereafter, assuming such a transition actually happens?

The opening paragraph of this post touched on the kinds of small disagreements that happen between couples and smalls groups of people. It would be absurd to suggest that all such disagreements could disappear, regardless of the social arrangement. Does this mean the inevitable emergence of groupings that develop distinct philosophies, sensibilities, jargon, expertise, etc? Is therefore the perpetual emergence of dehumanization inescapable? Even assuming an abundance, an absence of poverty, provision of the basics to all humans everywhere; even assuming that drudge work is automated, or, less technologically, that whatever work done by human hand is uniformly seen as essential and therefore ‘good,’ how can we possibly imagine an end of conflict and disagreement, of diverging interests, perceptions, philosophies?

In hunter gatherer groups, to my mind the closest analog to a human society directly governed by egalitarianism and natural law, violence and other conflict occurred. Indeed, murder was an accepted way of dealing with those who refused to conform to tradition, after other avenues had been exhausted. The group co-evolves with its particular environment and develops traditions and culture it ‘must’ adhere to to survive. Anyone threatening that is a threat to the group (obviously) and must be dealt with in the interest of the majority. And yet change happens. We today have states and multi-national corporations. We also have an overarching paradigmatic consensus based on private property, money, competition and survival of the fittest which, though fractious, kinda-sorta holds us together. But it's breaking apart, quickly, and even the elite know this, from what I can tell. Change is upon us.

Whatever change of direction is in the offing, whatever new paths emerge from the rubble of the current global meltdown, if we are interested in wisdom—and I believe we are—we must not allow ourselves to be overtaken by rigid ideology, fanaticism, or insistence on anything in particular. Though even writing this I feel like an ideologue. Even the posting of opinion as an admonition to beware stubborn and over-emotional loyalty to this or that ideology quickly becomes a work of hypocrisy. There is a necessarily impenetrable aspect to pondering what lies around the corner. And though reference to the past is helpful, my increasingly erudite gut tells me that this time it’s different. I mean really different. Something profound is underway here, in which our past efforts are all caught up and intertwined; Rome, Greece, China, India, Persia, Turkey, Europe, The United State, ‘The Primitives’ and so on; humanity has been cooking in its multiple soups for millennia and somehow it all comes together here, now. At not one time in all the ructions and upheavals that have brought us here had we seen earth from outer space, got to know each other via international travel and media such as radio and television, spoken to each other from one corner of the globe right across to its furthest opposite, instantaneously, nor had we experienced social networking software, though horribly commercialized, giving us a practical sense of being joined, across nations and cultures, into one fractious family. This is very, very new.

Violence is something intensely unpleasant. It is natural during periods of profound change to want to heal that which has gone wrong, to prevent evil from happening again. But evil is a perception of violence which can only be done away with by throwing out too intensity and pleasure. The vital diversity of perception which gives rise to the beautiful mess of life must mean, inescapably, that one man’s pleasure is another’s poison, which must likewise mean tragedy, violence, suffering and so on, are as vital as anything else.

I think what we can realistically imagine is learning from history. The type of violence that we might therefore rid ourselves of, is of the large group scale that leads to war and wanton destruction. Weapons of mass destruction are part of that wisdom. The majority of us simply don’t want to unleash that much suffering on each other, don’t want to wipe out millions of our fellow humans, nor, indeed, other life forms. The majority are probably far wiser than the elite on this and many other topics. As Charles Eisenstein says, we are falling in love with life. E. O. Wilson called this biophilia. I think this too is new. Our new, self-conscious appreciation of empathy is a huge part of this.

My strong sense is that an anarchistic, self-organizing system would allow us all to have more immediate control of the direction humanity pursues. In such a system we simply would not see it as beneficial to dumb ourselves down, to foster and entrench deep wealth and power divisions, and instead see health in the relatively unimpeded and open flow of wealth and power across all of humanity. The impetus towards direct democracy, with software like Liquid Democracy as pioneered by The Pirates, including direct action movements like Occupy Wall Street and many others, are the vanguard of this. If we make it, if we do create a garden of Eden on earth, violence will be there as it always was, as will scorpions, snakes, mosquitoes, wasps, weeds, and so on. But our appreciation of the mess of it all will have evolved.

If we make it through this challenge, it will only be because we have earned it, acquired the cultural wisdom to deal creatively and constructively with our new technologies, the challenges of peak growth, peak oil, peak debt and peak everything else, and organized ourselves accordingly. In such a system, whatever we decide to call it, there will be far less ‘unnecessary’ violence than in our current, disintegrating model, not because we seek to eradicate violence, but because a more just, more open and transparent model will give rise to less, by default. Consensus may or may not be as fraught as it is today, but perhaps our patience and maturity in dealing with achieving it will improve.

Worth fighting for.

On Violence

2011-09-30T00:12:00.000-07:00

“vi•o•lence [vahy-uh-luh ns]
noun
1. swift and intense force: the violence of a storm.
2. rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment: to die by violence.
3. an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws: to take over a government by violence.
4. a violent act or proceeding.
5. rough or immoderate vehemence, as of feeling or language: the violence of his hatred.”

“Only those at the top of the hierarchy can afford to pay, and therefore attract and retain, the services of the state’s best story-tellers, chroniclers, historians, priests, etc. The risks that the texts these writers produce one day confine future rulers to a particular interpretation and therefore inhibit their freedom to rule as desired, are minimised by both dominating their interpretation (i.e. with a priestly class), and writing texts as open-ended and conflicted as possible (i.e. The Bible). The written word is thus both the source of state permanence and the justification thereof, as well as of diplomatic, lawyerly and political double-speak the modern world knows so well, and has become so jaded by.”

The above is a quote from my book, the dictionary definition I pasted from dictionary.com. I’m not quoting my work here to advertise my wares, but because it introduces something Debbie has been bringing to my attention recently, both in comments and in email exchange: violence is as natural as sunshine. I’ve been pondering this for a while, and wanted to invite comment and critique, or any sort of observation on the nature of violence, because I see this topic, and its association with force and the threat of force, as a fundamentally important area for those of us seeking to define what might happen after capitalism, what direction we ought to try to follow.

Thus far my musings have generated the following rough thoughts.

Hobbes, whose thinking still dominates today even among those who believe they no longer think that way, saw a progression away from ‘uncivilized’ violence characteristic of anarchy towards a state monopoly on force, so as to minimize violence and increase harmony. Is there an animal more violent than we humans, the sole creators of the state? If not, why not, and what does that mean? A solitary predator like the tiger is not violent beyond some dynamically balanced relationship with its environment. They defend their territory and nothing more. Indeed, well fed in a domain that can keep them that way one could hardly call them violent; more ‘necessarily aggressive.’ I imagine such is true of all other solitary predators. Social predators such as wolves (no Hobbesian war of each against all there, and no state either) are also not violent beyond the immediate survival needs of the pack. Wolves are hierarchical, but also quite communistic it seems. They have ‘developed’ a crude consensus-maintaining system which is far more intricate than was once assumed in the alpha-leader-and-the-rest model. The details of this are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that violence, be it of storms, tigers or wolves, never attains the level of something like torture. Are humans different? Yes, but so is everything else. In everything we do, we are as natural as the weather. Is violence in the human realm Evil?

Should we seek to transcend violence, end war, crime, suffering? No, that’s utopian. Hobbes was a loyal servant of the state because it minimized (in his eyes) the natural urge to violence in every human breast, not because it eradicated it. He was no dewy eyed idealist. That accusation is more accurately leveled at me and those who see more cooperation, harmony and ‘justice’ emerging more or less spontaneously by transcending the state form, demoting money to as minimal a role as possible, and revolutionizing just about everything else. Such a direction can only be trod by a people willing, ready and able to do so. But how might a people, across the planet no less, agree to such a radical change? Won’t that take violence? And don’t the means become the ends?

Violence could well be embedded inextricably in our ability to assert an opinion, to come to a conclusion, to interpret. Because everything is unique there must be as many opinions and interpretations as there are people. For there to be consensus some violence must be done, some must lose, sovereignty must be yielded. If we are to have agreement, some are going to be unhappy. Society thus requires violence in an ongoing way, whether hierarchical or anarchic, whether implicit or explicit. On top of this, even non-violent rebellion must be violent, even if its members are all pacifists, because the object of the rebellion—most likely a state—can only react violently. Even ‘peaceful’ refusal to cooperate at all invites violence, since one is thereby rejecting existing consensus. One is a party-pooper of the worst possible kind; rejecting the right to party in the first place. I am unaware of any minority becoming the majority consensus without this involving violence. And to embark on that path requires almost fanatical passion, for choosing to be an outsider, one calling for fundamental change, is a lifelong commitment likely consigning one to the wilderness, to the fringe. To be able to bear that kind of isolation one must be insensitive to others, and hence, in a way, sociopathic. (By this I do not mean uttely without compassion, but that an element of this deep insensitivity must be there.)

Today society worldwide is more complex and interconnected than it has ever been. Much energy of many kinds has been invested in its construction. The amount of energy it will take to change course is enormous. This enormous amount of energy must be applied against the wishes of the majority. How can this not be violent? Or, for the majority to want something different, violent collapse, which releases coherent energy into wilder forms, must first happen. Violence again.

Because of the mess and 'uncontrollability' of life generally, violence pops up everywhere. The amount of control necessary to turn every single citizen into a ‘non-violent’ person, the amount of repression, the totality of ownership of interpretation of all existing and future data would itself be violence, and doomed to fail too. Control is an illusion generated by our sense of being separate from nature. In truth we only react, we never act. There are no uncaused causes, hence violence has to happen, in that the unwanted has to happen, and sometimes with great force. We can’t always be ‘right,’ and others will always have different perceptions, pleasures and opinions.

Leaving violence behind is as impossible as leaving opinion and perception behind. The paradox of this is wrapped up in empathy—the opposite of psychopathy—which enables us to feel what others feel, even those alien to us. Just as we are passionate passengers of our lives, so our lives become aligned and entangled with those of others and Universe generally. How could it be otherwise? We are not separate, we are of All. For me it is therefore the fact of empathy, evident too in monkeys, elephants and other animals, that suggests to me a different and, yes, ‘better’ system—one in which our potential to enjoy our lives richly, as our inter-being and co-evolution ‘create’ our entangled trajectories, and allow them the ‘freedom’ to blossom fully, including error, suffering and tragedy—is possible.

There will be violence and crime always, but perhaps our relationships to these inevitabilities will simply be maturer and less hysterical. I think that’s well worth fighting for.

Alessio Rastani: Our Saviour

2011-09-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

So it turns out Alessio Rastani is not an expert in the way an organization of the high reputation of the British Broadcasting Corporation would ordinarily appoint to pontificate on a matter of such import. Isn’t that the sweetest thing!

The Beeb have embarrassed themselves by hiring some failed trader to voice his (expert!) opinion on the global financial crisis, is shocked when same then speaks what millions believe, meaning that millions hear this information for the first time on a mainstream outlet, and the expert doesn’t even own his own house! Sublime. Talk about a poster child for The New Way.

I am not an expert. And thank goodness. Our stock of experts from all corners of the globe seem incapable of arguing their ways out of wet paper bags, or at least of calling a spade a spade. That a so-called non-expert, a failed trader according to the balance sheet quoted by the Telegraph, should squeeze onto the prime time and go viral with “Goldman Sachs rules the world!” is about as tautly ironic a moment as we could possibly deserve to enjoy.

When the first rumours started circulating that this was a hoax, I have to confess I thought it would be better that way. It really doesn’t matter how expert or otherwise Alessio Rastani is, what matters is what he said, the BBC’s reaction to him, and how his interview went viral. His message is what I suspect even governments believe, and, deep down, even the mainstream media. We are fooling ourselves still that the façade is real, that Mummy and Daddy are in nicely charge, that the wheels are not off, and that ‘normal’ is coming back. Who then but a fool to point out the bleeding obvious, that the emperor has no clothes?

Sublime. Cosmic. Fated. Mythic. Wonderful.

Are Market Traders Psychopathic?

2011-09-26T23:49:00.000-07:00

Hamburg – Why do traders like the exposed London UBS dealer Kweku Adoboli blow away billions? What’s going wrong at the banks, or with our young professionals? One thing’s for sure; they behave more recklessly and manipulatively than psychopaths – which is the conclusion a recent study conducted by the University of St. Gallen comes to, as SPIEGEL found out.

The cooperativeness and egoism of 28 professional traders were studied. The subjects had to play computer simulations and undergo intelligence tests. The results exceeded the expectations of the Team of Pascal Scherrer and Thomas Noll, forensics experts [“Forensiker und Vollzugsleiter”?] from the Swiss Prison of Pöschwies, north of Zurich.

“Of course we can’t call the traders mentally disturbed”, says Noll, “but the traders did behave, for example, in a more egoistical and reckless manner than a group of psychopaths who took the same test.”

Especially surprising for Noll: In total the bankers didn’t win any more money than the control group. Instead of competently and soberly pursuing maximum profit, “the traders sought only to get more than their competitors. And they put a lot of energy into harming them.”

Noll compared the situation to a neighbour having the same car, “and you go at it with a baseball bat, just so that yours looks better”. The scientists cannot explain this drive to destroy. The UBS dealer Adoboli, who blew two billion dollars, will remain in custody until further notice.
Der Spiegel (My translation.)

“Of course we can’t call the traders mentally disturbed”. Of course not. They’re professionals. They work in respected institutions and were once known as Masters of the Universe. The very last thing such people are is mentally disturbed. They know what they’re doing.

And don’t forget the Invisible Hand. Forget neither that economics is and should remain amoral. We are all, individually and collectively, far better off if we behave more recklessly than psychopaths. This is what the free market promises to deliver. The last thing we want is any of our precious freedom to accumulate wealth in a ‘Devil take the hindmost’ fashion be taken from us. As long as I could not give a fuck how well you’re doing, everything will be just fine, if you’re like that too.

On the BBC yesterday trader Alessio Rastani told his interviewer his version of the truth: “This economic crisis is like a cancer, if you just wait and wait hoping it is going to go away, just like a cancer it is going to grow and it will be too late!” He goes on to point out that national governments are powerless, and that Goldman Sachs rules the world. Alessio wants to help people though. He advises us protect our assets, have good hedge strategies, take advantage of the coming collapse. It doesn’t appear to occur to him that his advocacy is for us to be more like him. His message is that traders do not care. Or rather, the only thing they care about is making more money than their ‘competitors.’ The consequences of this are collapse. His cure is to take advantage of collapse just like traders do.

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” Albert Einstein.

“Of course we can’t call the traders mentally disturbed.” Thomas Noll.

I think Thomas Noll is doing good work, but I side with Einstein here. And I think it really is past high time we recognize that we are slaves to an insane system of perpetual pillage that cannot stop until it devours itself, and most of us with it.

Obey The Market Obey The Market Obey The Market ...

2011-09-24T03:36:00.000-07:00

This just in: Obey the Market! If we do, all will be well.

I had a brain-flash earlier this week, what with the stock markets of the world going nuts, people panicking, talk of doom every which way. I was due one, and providence delivered. After all, I write this blog and owe it to me public to guide with wisdom in troubled times. Brain-flashes don’t visit me often, so when they do, I lie down and take them very seriously indeed. Thankfully this one was brilliant in its simplicity.

Four small words a child can understand: Bail out the banks.

Hear me out. Don’t think I haven’t thought this through.

As we all know, times are troubled right now. I won’t list the details because they’re everywhere in plain sight, but when I say every one of us owes everyone an awful lot of money, I suspect you’ll know what I’m talking about. That’s right, money is the problem. And, being money factories creating, selling, storing and moving money throughout the economy, the banks are suffering bad. These poor guys are hurting like nobody’s business and if they stumble, should they fall upon their brave knees, we have to be there to help them stand tall again. We need them as they need us. We’re in this together. If we don’t step up to the plate here and sign over all the money we can’t possibly afford unless we do so, they’ll die.

It’s that simple. We have to dig deep into our collective debt and borrow more money from the banks to bail them out so that we can pay them back the money we lent them ... sorry, they lent us to lend them to help them help us help them out. It’s that simple.

And I’m not even going to try and frighten you with a description of the bloody mayhem that will erupt in full fury the very second we don’t bail out the banks, because deep in our hearts, we all know this is so. The choice is stark: act to bail out the banks, or die horribly. Even you, dearest Reader!

But here’s the real stunner. At last the experts agree with me! Check this out:

“G20 must unite again to resolve crisis as it did in 2009, says Lagarde
IMF managing director invokes spirit of London summit, saying 'we need to address the current crisis together'”

“IMF chief tells Europe: you must bail out the banks again” (Guardian headlines)

“We need to recapitalise European banks.” (Edward Harrison.)

“Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner drew a cool response from EU policymakers when he urged them to leverage their bailout fund to better tackle the debt crisis and to start speaking with one voice.” (Reuters)

In the company of kings at last. I always secretly dreamed I’d find respect from the leaders of our world, those who really know how the game works, and now it looks like I have my in. The only problem is you could argue I hastily patched this article together after reading those headlines. It’s not true. I am as clever as they are and can have ideas as brilliant as theirs.

“Politicians must listen to the markets, not ignore them” (Telegraph)

“Warning of a stock market rout unless a eurozone rescue package is found. Obama urges France and Germany to move quickly to find a solution to the eurozone crisis, while UK chancellor George Osborne claims Britain is 'ahead of the curve'” (Guardian)

There you have it. The Market is telling us to bail out the banks because if we don’t ... Well, you know what will happen. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

P.s. This article assumes the world began in 2010.

Pirates Storm German Parliament!!

2011-09-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

No joke. [In German, Pirate Party website.]

The party I voted for on Sunday in Berlin's local election has won 14 seats. The FDP (a business friendly liberal party, currently in coalition with the CDU) received under 2% of the vote and have thus no seats. A genuine double whammy election shocker. Tabloid-style headlines and sentence structure fully justified.

I voted for the Pirates (Die Piraten) because they are for transparency in the political process, direct democracy, guaranteed income, and other assorted sensible ideas. I thought I'd give a small taste of their platform by translating some of their manifesto so that you have it straight from the pirate's mouth, as it were.

TRANSPARENCY
We see transparency as a duty of Berlin. We will abolish regulations for application [I assume this is concerned with over-complicated German bureaucracy regarding political participation], minimize entry restrictions and abolish fees for [publication of political] information and reports. We demand that every step of bidding, contract negotiations and contract signing processes are made public. Every contract will only become valid after it has been made public; old contracts will be looked into anew. Documentation pertaining to committee meetings, board meetings, etc., will be immediately and clearly published, online and offline. In future the public are only to be excluded from sessions in rare cases, sessions will be broadcast live on the internet and recorded. Every delegate is to make public his/her contacts to lobby organizations, unions and other organizations. We will live transparency. All data and works brought into existence by taxpayer funds will be made public and available to every citizen. Berlin must inform her citizens about every new project as early as possible, so that her citizenry has a proper opportunity to participate. Press laws will be changed such that no whistle-blower need have any fear of the state.

NETWORKS
We will prepare the way for free, Berlin-wide wireless internet access and abolish operator liability for public WLAN networks. Furthermore we want to show every Berliner and this city's guests how to use this network.

EDUCATION
For learning too we insist on the freedom and self-determination of the individual. All students shall have the chance to organize and complete their schooling individually. We want to democratize schooling institutions. In the future there will be one teacher to every fifteen students. We will end the use of filter software in public education establishments and enable free and open access to all information available on the Internet. We will also make sure that all students are able to work with digital media and will school them accordingly. We will also provide free lunches. We will offer students of non-state schools the same developmental opportunities as those of state schools, and expand and improve the teaching of German as a second language. We will abolish fixed school times so as to enable an open and critical coarse of study. Longer term we want to set up a round table as a public forum for all involved in higher education. We want to realize a library statute in Berlin.

Now I did not vote for Die Piraten because I am a political animal fervently in support of one party or the other, nor because I understand the fine details, or even the totality of their whole program in general, but because this is a party called The Pirates who are gently and humorously making the right noises and prodding the mainstream in the right direction. The party has only been around since 2006, so this is an explosive start, and is making headlines here. They've knocked the FDP out of the Berlin Parliament (The Greens expanded their share of the vote too), and this represents a major shift in the politics of Berlin, a sea change.

It just so happens the the father of one of my daughter's friends is "A Pirate" so I will be grilling him soon as to what the party is going to do with its power, and other questions along those lines. If you guys want to know anything, drop me a line...

Capitalism is Communism – The Proof

2011-09-13T03:47:00.000-07:00

(My posts have been getting rather long in the tooth of late, so here’s a ditty you won’t have to wade through.)

Premise: Money underpins the entire economy. The current system of central banks creating the “high powered money” that represents the private banks’ reserves is actually a hidden commons.

Watch this deft sleight-of-hand:

Reserves are central-bank-created money which must legally be present in sufficient volume in the ‘vaults’ of private banks, such that citizens’ claims on that money—via the “credit money” they have on deposit—are effective should people withdraw actual cash. The ratio of high powered money to credit money typically stated is 10:1. Let’s run with that.

Hence, you and maybe nine other citizens of your country who have, say, one dollar ‘in’ your bank account, each possess an equal and simultaneous claim on some ‘real’ dollar ‘present’ in the total reserves of the private bank system. The point, of course, is that each of us has sufficient access to the ‘real’ dollar held in reserve. Your ‘private ownership’ of your dollar is in fact no such thing. You share that dollar with roughly nine other people (if you’re lucky), hence we sort of rent money from each other via banks! Money, it turns out, is an abused commons from which private banks profit. (The degree to which society ‘benefits’ from this system I’ll not address here.)

Therefore, at the bottom of the entire modern capitalist system is a depth of sharing that would beggar the belief of those neoliberal economists who insist we humans prefer competition, that the commons is always a tragedy, and sharing is impossible. It turns out we are already experts, it’s just that we don’t know it. Weird, but true.

Proposal: All it takes is setting things up such that we have sufficient access to what we need and enjoy. Who needs ownership! Let’s go!

One more observation on this theme. Consider two supposedly diametrically opposed notions, one the essence of socialism, the other the essence of capitalism (I’ll let you assign them):

1. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

2. The Law of Supply and Demand.

At root, aren’t they the same thing? We ‘supply’ what we can and ‘demand’ what we need.

When it comes to defining ‘needs’ we can of course argue all sorts of things, but I would say the prevailing paradigm tells us what we need; a nice car, a large house, fashionable clothes, etc. Different paradigms at different stages and places of history have generated different conclusions about human needs, and it would be absurd to assert that the current paradigm will hold for all time. Hence “to each according to his needs” is as valid to consumerism (one is often depressed and dejected if one is not a (credit) card-holding Consumer able to demonstrate full participation in the consumption game) as it is to any other social system. And isn’t the goal of neoliberal economics to equip as many as possible with the wealth necessary to fully participate, to leave no one behind, to raise all boats together? Isn’t the Invisible Hand supposed to deliver the best of all possible worlds?

Of course there’s greed to consider, but the admirable sharing we all engage in, merely hinted at above, the endemic absence of total property rights regarding our ‘own’ money, strongly suggests this whole greed shebang is one big delusion. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I know no greedy people. I’ve heard of Jamie Dimon, John Pierpont Morgan, and others, but they are hardly the norm. Don’t we think such people are sick in the head? The famous insatiably greedy normal person only turns up in arguments, as an assertion that ‘everyone’s greedy.’ Are you greedy beyond all hope of satiety, dear reader? Are your wants infinite? Are you an immortal locust of infinite consumptive capacity?

I believe we’ve tricked ourselves into thinking we’re insatiably greedy. Silly us, to think we’re all alike in that regard, all hungering after endless numbers of Ferarris, MacMansions, golf club memberships, caviar, lobster thermidor, Barbies, iPads, all-you-can-eat fast-food, etc., and that we cannot be happy unless we are in hot pursuit of such items. And consuming them.

Kind of an embarrassing collective self-deception, but hey, I think we can give ourselves a break. It’s not everyday a species emerges from the complex life-ground of a lush and impossibly beautiful planet of breath-taking diversity, sporting opposable thumbs, high social intelligence, upright walking and abstract language, to wander around for hundreds of thousands of years before inventing farming, homes, and then states. It hasn’t been easy, but history has not stopped. We’re not dead yet and the Challenge of Being is as juicy and full of potential now as it ever was.

Dig in!

German Government Admits Money System Is Giant Ponzi Scheme

2011-09-08T01:25:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year a petition to the German government received enough votes (4,254) to have to be addressed by the government. The petition called for 100% reserve banking, giving the following reasons (as the government interpreted them) for its request (from Sein magazine):

As grounds for his petition the petitioner argued, in particular, that banks need only demonstrate eight percent capital cover to be able to allocate 100 percent credit. Because banks demand interest on this credit, i.e., ask for more money back than they originally lend into the system, the total debt owed grows faster than the available credit. This leads (according to the petitioner) to ever growing debts, including on the public account, and will lead to yet worse financial crises than the current.

It’s very good, in my opinion, that this debate can take place at all, and I think highly of the German state for having mechanisms in place that enable this. Nevertheless, the request was denied, and the grounds for the denial are both entertaining and revealing. I would say far more revealing than the government intended. Here are the core arguments:

Money is a central component of economic life. […] Alongside its functions as medium of exchange and unit of account, money is also a store of value. The more stable money is, the better these functions can be fulfilled, and, therefore, the smoother the economy will run.

Standard fare. And yet money-as-commodity, from which ever-growing money-profit can directly be made (per M-->Mn-->Mn2, rather than C-->M-->C’ of typical exchange (Commodity sold for Money to buy another Commodity)) via currency exchanges and interest-based means, is implicit in the government’s position. How healthy this mechanism might be is of course not up for discussion, cannot even be mentioned as a possible topic even in a response to a petition discussing the money system. Indeed, the government’s entire response is a textbook rendition of the prevailing economic orthodoxy, which rests on assumptions debunked countless times in recent decades (and even centuries).

The business operations of the money and credit institutions fulfil a central role in an economy.

Money is important, thus banks are too. Then follows some blah blah about how important it is that banks operate sensibly, with an almost tangential reference to fractional reserves (“in Höhe eines bestimmten Prozentsatzes” = “at the level of a specific percentage”). It just emerges in the paragraph, a passing reference to the main problem denoted by the petition, popping up briefly in the refusal-text as a strength.

Next the mechanism of central banking is briefly laid out:

Because the central bank in the Euro system makes high powered money (“Zentralbankgeld”) available to the banks, it can influence the business operations of those banks. Private banks create money when they grant their customers credit by booking the amount due on their accounts. They expand the money supply via credit creation without any involvement of the central bank. The banks are, however, bound to new high powered money, because they must also make cash available to their customers, and maintain a part of their account deposits as assets at the central bank in the form of minimum reserves. The high powered money requirements of private banks is thus the central bank’s leverage (?? “Ansatzpunkt”) for influencing the credit money creation of the private banks.

Again, standard fare. One look at the fact-based evidence of Steve Keen’s “The Roving Cavaliers of Credit” should be enough to destroy this oft asserted claim, and yet “the entire body strides vigorously forward” still. When you have power, you can ignore facts and repeat lies in archaic terminology slick enough to be a ‘get out of jail free’ card (until the show stops).

There follows the conventional view about central bank control of base rates (low interest rates = high economic growth, high interest rates = slow growth), even though the last few years are demonstrating—for all to see—how ineffective this ‘control’ is. Then comes the jewel:

As a rule, interest on borrowing is earned through additional production and income. Financing with new debts, on the other hand, would indeed lead to over-indebtedness and—practiced across the board—to a collapse of the financial system.
[My emphasis.]

Without growth, the system would collapse. You can’t just keep on piling debt on top of debt unless there is sufficient economic growth paying for it. That’s a ponzi scheme. I hope this justifies my tabloid-style, eye-catching headline.

There follows more blah blah about how damaging inflation is, especially for people on low incomes, best prevented by “independent central banks” charged with ensuring price stability. Best not mention the frequency of economic shocks that have peppered modern history with astonishing frequency, though there is mention of the hyperinflation caused by over-reliance on the famous printing press. I love the argument that borrowing money is not printing money. As if, because we owe more than we print, we are not printing. As if systemic addiction to perpetual growth has a stabilizing influence. Gold has risen from the mid $200s to almost $2,000 per ounce today in about ten years! In 1971 an ounce of gold cost about $40! Price stability!? Wages, on the other hand, have been quite flat for thirty or forty years. Commodities generally tell a very inflationary or volatile tale. And look at housing. Energy. Food. Even on their own arguments the system has failed. The only stable dynamic it generates is robbing the poor to pay the rich.

The last quote I want to draw your attention to is the last two sentences of the penultimate paragraph:

The petitioner’s recommendation to install a 100% reserve system for credit institutions would yield a steep reduction in credit extension and thus call the existence of private banks into question. The consequences of this would be that the banking and finance system, as well as the money circulation of the private sector, would be jeopardized.

It is precisely this the petitioner was hoping for. The response is a tacit admission that the petitioner is correct, but that The System has to be protected because it works the way it does. No claim is backed by any evidence, and everything we see around us today in economies across the planet flatly contradicts the government’s position.

To conclude: there’s a clear admission that economic growth backs usury, and a clear admission that should growth not occur for long enough, the system collapses. That is an implicit admission that the money system is a ponzi scheme. The insistence that ‘that’s how it works,’ while inevitable, is in itself an admission that they have a serious systemic problem; infinite growth on a finite planet is simply impossible. Whether or not they recognize this is anyone’s guess.

In toto the response is an admission that the government borrows—via bonds etc.—from private banks and other financial bodies the very money with which it equips those same private banks. Private banks then use the money they ‘loaned’ the government as ‘reserves’ to extend loans (credit money) to citizens at some reserve ratio. Or put another way, private banks use the (non-existent) money loaned by them to The Government and backed by The People as backing for credit-loans lent to The People for the express purpose of growing the economy and the economy’s money supply. Or in even simpler terms, people borrow from themselves to back money they then use to borrow more money from themselves. And the interest flows to the owners of money. We are puppets, and our strings are made of the money we pay the cost of borrowing into existence.

Quite the circle jerk. If you can get your head around it.

Money, Debt, Reserves, Money and Debt II

2011-09-03T00:23:00.000-07:00

We are often told money does not grow on trees. So where, then? For grow it most certainly does, and dies, is somehow born, plus all sorts of other organic-like stuff; ‘money talks,’ ‘let your money work for you,’ ‘money never sleeps,’ and so on. What follows is a partial, though lengthy look under the hood of money creation, ably assisted by Warren Mosler’s booklet “Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy” and the Chicago Fed’s “Modern Money Mechanics”. My own idiosyncratic reactions to those booklets’ contents does the rest. (Thanks to Sigi for putting me firmly on this path!)

For those of you who understand reserve accounting, note that the Fed can’t do what’s called a reserve drain without doing a reserve add. So what does the Fed do on settlement day when Treasury balances increase? It does repos – to add the funds to the banking system that banks then have to buy the Treasury Securities. Otherwise, the funds wouldn’t be there to buy the Treasury securities, and the banks would have overdrafts in their reserve accounts. And what are overdrafts at the Fed? Functionally, an overdraft is a loan from the government. Ergo, one way or another, the funds used to buy the Treasury securities come from the government itself. Because the funds to pay taxes or buy government securities come from government spending, the government is best thought of as spending first, and then collecting taxes or borrowing later.
[Warren Mosler. My emphases.]

A simplification* certainly, nevertheless complicated stuff. Somehow counter-intuitive. A central bank just creates money, from nowhere, because it can. Government sells debt because … more on that below. Money is injected into the system, money with which government debt can be bought so as not to incur the irritation of commercial bank overdrafts of accounts held at the Fed.

Why so complicated? My short answer: banks are profit-making businesses with enormous, centralized power. The commercial bank system is the sole conduit between people and “high powered money” and exists to make money for its owners. Banks are businesses. Banks are therefore usurers ‘corporatized,’ which in effect means institutionalized, which means state-sanctioned. They are also, at some size and in the eyes of the state, too big to fail. They are therefore, ipso facto, part of the state. They are not distinct components of a logically separate ‘private’ sector, somehow at the mercy of government high powered money creation. Indeed, my impression is that central banks exist in part to mask how powerful commercial banks are. Of course economic stability is key, but one can also argue that such stability as is achieved serves commercial banks more than any other sector; it must, after all be stable growth. Economic Growth is systemically yoked to usury and the dynamic of the pyramid scheme, and is hidden core of our money system.

The Fed can’t drain without first adding: To me, that’s not really a drain. That’s like adding water to a pool in the hope that the pool’s manager will allow you to take it out again in exchange for magically expanding ice cubes with different melting rates.

Repos: adding funds to the banking system, funds which banks then might use to buy government debt—note there are “primary dealers” ‘obliged’ to buy government debt at debt auctions. So why bond auctions at all? Why not just hand over the bonds ‘for free’ and cut out step 1? Because then the money markets would no longer be money markets as we know them. Then the whole thing would be too much of a joke, and a less entertaining one than a game of Monopoly. The following quotes hint at what I mean:

“Efforts to rescue the UK economy were plunged into fresh uncertainty this morning after the government failed to find a buyer for some of its debt, the first such failure in seven years.”
[The Guardian]

“1.923 BTC X 61.59% Primary Dealer bid = 1.18 BTC (PD), greater than 1.0. Or to put it a different way, but for the primary dealers the bid-to-cover was less than one, meaning that some of the issue would have been left on the table.
“Thats a fail; but for the primary dealers the issue would not have subscribed.
“Primary dealers are required to bid. That's the deal in exchange for their being named as "primary dealers." For this reason short of thermonuclear war you will never see an actual (BTC < 1.0) "fail" on a US Treasury Auction - Treasury has rigged the process so as to insure that cannot be reported.”
[Market Ticker]

“China's finance ministry has failed to sell all 28bn yuan ($4.1bn; £2.55bn) of one-year government bonds it offered at an auction.
“It is the first under-subscribed government bond auction since 2003.”
[The BBC]

Quite embarrassing (or at the very least odd) when you ‘give’ the buyers the money with which to buy your product! And I do not believe all of the above is pure, clueless guff from a mainstream media unacquainted with the fine points of MMT. The larger story such stories weave is very important, very powerful, has us in its grip. Ownership of this story, being able to propagate it at will, controlling the paradigm, this is what is at stake here. Who owns the story? The ‘People’ or The ‘Elite’? Does MMT threaten this story, or merely present it from a different angle?

Bond issuance is serious stuff, no matter how ‘effortlessly’ central banks can change numbers in commercial bank accounts. Mosler’s analogy of a football stadium able to display points on a scoreboard without having to borrow them, is misleading; there are very clear rules for the assignment of points dependent on the game of football afoot. As I understand it, the sale of bonds is, from one perspective, a way of measuring the market’s opinion of that country’s growth prospects. From another it is a large, international process which boils down to control of the money system by the owners of money, that is control of the flow of funds generated by usury. Thus if governments were to side-step bond issuance entirely, directly pump the economy with high powered money as they saw fit, that would be printing, pure and simple. That would be government determination of how much money the economy needs, not market. It would be the government ignoring the market. But the market’s opinion must hold, because the Free Market Myth says, ‘Invisible Hand Knows Best!’; that government interference in, or ignoring of the market produces negative outcomes. To be wise, to be in tune with what economics and history have proven time and again, governments should yield to market forces, just as we must all yield to gravity. If we ignore this universal truth, hyperinflation will (eventually) occur (which, by uncanny coincidence, happens to hurt the owners of money more than borrowers).

High powered money is not ‘given’ with the explicit instruction to buy X amount of government debt with it (of course, not only banks buy bonds, but the money to do so does come from their ‘reserves’). Bond auctions must be (more or less) genuine auctions. There is a choice to hold onto the injected cash or exchange it for something less liquid. The stated reason for the injection of high powered money (HPM) is to keep reserves up, to prevent commercial bank overdrafts at the central bank. That annoyance would mean some commercial banks owed the government money, whereas bond ownership means the government owes banks money. Much nicer. What the commercial banks freely decide to do with those freshly injected reserves is their business (unless they happen to be “primary dealers”). As such, “high powered money” hardly has the descriptive ring of truth to it! Its existence and creation is more the legal requirement of a system designed to keep money fruitful and potent, in and of itself, I believe as a centralized tool of control. HPM serves to enable usury, even though usury does not require it (arguments of stability to one side); Canada has a zero reserve system. In the end it is usury which must survive. This system works in the interests of the owners of wealth, who get to make judgments, and profit, on the ever-shifting attractiveness of various currencies, regardless of whether it was cynically designed to do so; regardless, too, of whether the ‘elites’ really are elite and thus ‘deserve’ to protect their positions via such mechanisms.

So, why do governments sell debt? Because of usury generally, because the rich and powerful want to carry on making more money from their money, indefinitely. The system works for them first, for the rest second, and by coincidence. ‘Trickle down’ is a sop. Even the twin responsibilities of ensuring the ‘correct’ quantity of HPM and preventing too high inflation, the main duties of a central bank, at the deepest level, work to protect (stabilize) the interest-based money system. Who in the mainstream talks warmly of zero or negative growth GDP? Social dividend? Demurrage? As such this system is a ponzi scheme for the ‘elites’ and will completely collapse when it becomes apparent to the majority that growth is over. The current system cannot cope with steady state economics. Private sector credit money may not, effectively and in toto, net to zero because its absence would be the destruction of at least 90% of the effective money out there. “Reserves are unchanged by the loan transactions. But the deposit credits constitute new additions to the total deposits of the banking system.” (From “Modern Money Mechanics” (my emphasis).) Were credit-money-originated claims on HPM ineffective or irrelevant or impotent, somehow not “legal tender”, somehow ‘less’ than HPM, the system simply would not work. “Nets to zero” is neither here nor there, is a red herring. Money promised to function as money must do so. And why do we have money? To assist the economy. Why must the economy be assisted? Because the Perpetual Growth economy, in its current form, sustains elitism.

Commercial bank overdrafts at the Fed: Loans from the government. If a commercial bank is net negative in its reserves, the government is obliged to ride to its rescue. How will a commercial bank repay that money? After all, it can’t create HPM! My guess would be to ‘win’ more reserves from other banks via ‘wise’ extention of credit, but, in truth, I don’t know, and haven’t seen the answer in Mosler’s book. Interest earned on loans does not alter the amount of reserves generally, and is furthermore bank earnings; that is, bank earnings pay bank operating costs, wages, profits to shareholders, etc., so are distributed back out into other accounts in the system as already existing reserves. One bank’s owing of reserves to the Fed is the system ‘bleeding’ HPM generally speaking. Think of all banks as one, as compartments containing the total of HMP in existence. Any reduction of the amount of HPM in the system is potentially dangerous, because credit money is the economy's lifeblood.

As an aside, this is good place to remind ourselves that interest is redistribution, not creation. But as that redistribution favours the owners of money (over time), shortfalls occur among the poorer portions of society, which generates a need for more HPM. If the economy is not growing sufficiently quickly, there will be falling demand for new loans, credit-money claims on HPM won’t multiply, and defaults (credit-money destruction prior to banks earning a profit) will increase. The amount of (effective) money in the economy shrinks and there is less profit to be earned from interest. If too many people and businesses are too indebted; as, say, oil reserves become increasingly more costly to extract, in energy terms; if also consumerism is faltering, its charisma wearing thin, even new injections of HPM will make no difference. All more HPM can do is increase the ratio of HPM to credit-money, e.g., raise reserves and lower the risk of a bank run (depending on many other factors). But the point is not the amount of HPM (which is almost like dead money), but the rate of growth of the economy as it relates to potential credit-money creation and profits via usury.

Borrowing later: Government creates the money it borrows. It gives the system the money it later borrows at interest. That’s weird and telling, in my opinion.

In brief, government places money as reserves into commercial bank reserve accounts, with which government debt can be ‘purchased.’ “Otherwise, the funds wouldn’t be there to buy the Treasury securities, and the banks would have overdrafts in their reserve accounts.” What a line! Banks with overdrafts mean banks with negative reserves. Counterproductive. Must be immediately rectified by the Fed.

Government sells bonds and other forms of debt as one way of taking HPM back out of those accounts, lowering (for a while) the amount ‘in existence.’ Each debt promises to pay back that amount of HPM to the bearer plus some interest. And then one day government pays out on those bonds, whereupon more HPM enters the system.

The HPM, which must be exchanged for these transactions to occur, is created at need by the government and only by the government. Funny money? What is that money backed by? Whence does its value come? Some say tax and the solvency of the people. I say the value of this money comes from growth of economic activity, or, ongoing sale and purchase of ever increasing amounts of goods and services. Imagine an economy with only taxation. Government gives you money, then taxes it away again. The evidence that growth backs money is the maths of usury (P < P+I), the way the system invariably collapses when it is not growing (recessions and depressions are Not Good), and that inflation drains value or wealth from money.

So, why buy government debt? You ‘exchange’ some of your high powered money for debt because you want the amount you hold of that currency to grow faster (or more securely) than it otherwise could in some savings account. You want more of that currency at some later stage. Why more of that particular currency? The only reason I can think of is because you expect it to be stronger than other currencies, to retain better its purchasing power relative to others. Or some other reason to do with increasing your wealth. You would not buy government debt expecting to lose money (except as a primary dealer, who’d be bailed out at need anyway).

In general

The system is about getting money-richer, money being sticky abstractions of ‘measured’ wealth. Money working for you. Investing so as to maximize profit from money-ownership; a wise mix of risky and stable in your portfolio. Government debt is sound. They can always pay. The only question is, what is the value of this currency relative to others? What does a bond or other government debt offer relative to a commercial bank savings account, or some stock, or gold, or oil? And growth in the economy must be occuring for growth of the money supply not to be inflationary. Growth must also be happening for there to be more and more people wanting to take out loans, earnings from which pay for the interest owed by banks to the owners of money.

The system looks like, as others have said, a government backed counterfeiting cartel. Its centre is the credit money system, for which the central bank acts as a kind of hidden guarantor, a rock of stability. HPM is an enabler of the commercial bank activity. In the end, it does not really matter whether we have 100% reserves or 0%; money means, systemically, that we all need money of some accepted kind to survive. When you need money to survive and there is not enough for everyone ‘out there’ (how could there possibly be enough?), some will have to borrow. Those in a position to ‘help’ financially people in need survive are systemically constrained to abuse that power, because the underlying premise of the entire system is differential advantage, perpetual competition, and success as concentration of wealth and power to increasingly few. (The appendix in Eisenstein’s “Sacred Economics” is very helpful on this point.)

Where does money disappear to? To the Great Nowhere of the Fed via taxes and government ‘debt.’ What about interbank lending; how did it dry up in the second half of 2008? If we are to understand HPM as a pool kinda sorta equally distributed (dynamically) among accounts held by commercial banks at the Fed, and if only the Fed can create/destroy it, how did it disappear to critically low levels? How was there a ‘shortage’ of it? Derivatives and sub-prime. ‘Creative’ forms of debt. The claims on HPM were excessively above ‘required’ reserve ratios and were cratering bank balance sheets. It’s not that HPM disappeared, it’s that there quickly became too little relative to the multiple and exotic claims on it. The HPM/Debt cocktail was way too thin (though HPM is also debt-bound due to government selling debt on the money markets). The bursting of the real estate bubble had an explosive impact on bank balance sheets, such that no bank trusted the other. What to do? The system can’t be allowed to fail! The rest, as the saying goes, is history. And the times are getting interestinger!

Some graphics inspired by Modern Money Mechanics

* “Currency held in bank vaults may be counted as legal reserves as well as deposits (reserve balances) at the Federal Reserve Banks. Both are equally acceptable in satisfaction of reserve requirements.” And: “Part of an individual bank’s reserve account may represent its reserve balance used to meet its reserve requirements while another part may be its required clearing balance on which earnings credits are generated to pay for Federal Reserve Bank services.” (From “Modern Money Mechanics”.) There are fine grades of difference in the role played by high powered money as it resides in different places, as well as what reserves really are, and not all of it is customer owned, even though there are—by virtue of the nature of fractional reserve banking itself—multiple valid claims on that ‘real’ money. As to ‘real’, in the end, the validity of any money, whether high powered or otherwise, rests on faith: “What, then, makes these instruments – checks, paper money, and coins – acceptable at face value in payment of all debts and for other monetary uses? Mainly, it is the confidence people have that they will be able to exchange such money for other financial assets and for real goods and services whenever they choose to do so.” (“Modern Money Mechanics”) I can only conclude that this complexity serves to generate a powerful and unconscious sense of wow! in the observer, to foster trust in the competence of the experts who designed and remain in tight control of such an amazing system. Seriously. This is an amazing system. The smarts involved in building and maintaining it are not to be underestimated. And, perhaps most importantly of all, it is a pseudo-solid chimera that can take almost any shape yet still be exactly what it is; wealth-mining machinery of exquisite design. After centuries in existence, we are still debating how it 'really' works. That says something.

The Rise and Fall of Narcissus Icarus

2011-08-27T09:01:00.000-07:00

I

Look! Somewhere else again

the beautiful at play, two at least.
As new leaves inhabit shine
they bend,
arch,
curve.

The setting barely matters. Strength
of their young Now, its vibrant Forever
firm, capable of anything. Forget all

concern. Smiles reflect
and guile loves innocence …

Gaze –

eyes bright with momentum
ignite love, so very deep.

Beauty to eat. Thighs butterfly
wet wounds at me
an old age away
at one

glassy remove. Palm

out the distance
on morning trains of dirt-yellow grey.

II

Mind out, vision in, Voyeur
sees shoulder and neck, head
and face strained in loose skin
grey under oily sheen.

For now there is no motion but this.
No air con noise. Black hair
pooled on cotton sheets her fingers

nestle in white curls sprouting
from his big back. For now
her touch is dead.

The lines that slot their heads
side to side—eyes mutually closed,
hips thrust down and in—

fill the frame, the mirror
rippling out through the stillness
my reverie births, here,

by the hotel pool, clean, blue.
Alone in its sunned waters, at play,
two young nymphs reflecting

my imagination. Mine. Their men,
broad, overweight, over fifty,

waddle to poolside, cast words
into the air, share smiles.
What I know of this
I could fit on a postcard.

What I know shines back at me.
Fall forever into reflections.

III

God glitters in the pellucid pool,
there, of the washed pebbles, the wash
itself. Reach in

and He dissolves. If His Hand
is anything, it is the Shine touch kills.

Hypnotic meadow, colour’s vast expanse.
We fly at the sun’s reflective pane

forever busied missing it
by one impossible inch

as heat melts everything.

Money = Equals

2011-08-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

(What follows here is a somewhat different run up at the conundrum of money and how it pertains to debt, and what both 'really' are.)

Ignorance ‘out there’ about money is about as endemic and deep rooted as possible, penetrating the highest halls of academia, flooding the busy offices of the world’s mainstream media outlets, and poisoning economic thought and study as far as the eye can see. My own studies have yielded repeated gems of ignorance even in works that are otherwise excellent exemplars of academic rigour. The problem is that our cultural notions of money remain almost totally unexamined, even though money is key to society. Somehow we are generally prevented from debating this enormously important topic as openly and widely as it deserves.

Our collective ability to pierce money and understand it has only recently begun at the level of popular culture (the Internet is instrumental in this). Bernard Lietaer, Stephen Zarlenga, Ellen Brown, David Graeber, Charles Eisenstein, Bernd Senf and Franz Hoermann are some of the authors I know doing fine work on the money myth, and there are many others I’ve still to get to. Yet even now, most people think (or feel) that money is (or should be) a thing with ‘intrinsic’ value, that it is, in some inescapable way, real wealth. Our deep history tells a different story. Money’s origin had far more to do with measurement than store, was far more about keeping track of stuff than being something ‘intrinsically’ valuable (even though there is utility value in keeping track of value!).

With that in mind, perhaps we shouldn’t be talking about a linear progress from commodity money to information money, but of a return to information money, albeit in a new form. Graeber talks of money as debt, debt as a promise, and suggests the type of question we should be asking is what kind of promise, and how those promises are generated and administered. The launching pad for this post, however, comes from Ellen Brown’s article, “Time for a New Theory of Money”.

The concept of money-as-a-commodity can be traced back to the use of precious metal coins. Gold is widely claimed to be the oldest and most stable currency known, but this is not actually true. Money did not begin with gold coins and evolve into a sophisticated accounting system. It began as an accounting system and evolved into the use of precious metal coins. Money as a “unit of account” (a tally of sums paid and owed) predated money as a “store of value” (a commodity or thing) by two millennia; the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations using these accounting-entry payment systems lasted not just hundreds of years (as with some civilizations using gold) but thousands of years. Their bank-like ancient payment systems were public systems—operated by the government the way that courts, libraries, and post offices are operated as public services today.

[...snip...]

The unit of weight was the “shekel,” something that was not originally a coin but a standardized measure. She was the word for barley, suggesting the original unit of measure was a weight of grain. This was valued against other commodities by weight: So many shekels of wheat equaled so many cows equaled so many shekels of silver, etc. Prices of major commodities were fixed by the government; Hammurabi, Babylonian king and lawmaker, has detailed tables of these. Interest was also fixed and invariable, making economic life very predictable.

The point I’d like to make here, one which Brown does not address, is that the notion “equals” is a 'wisdom' vital to developing the concept of money, as is the idea that “value” is measurable (value which is to be stored for practical reasons (see below)). Eisenstein talks about equivalence in “Sacred Economics”: “Money is homogeneous in that regardless of any physical differences among coins, coins qua money are identical (if they are of the same denomination). New or old, worn or smooth, all one-drachma coins are equal.”

Money cannot therefore be the thing denoting it, it can only be the agreement (or fiat) about the measurement of value (and/or a price system generating ongoing value measurements via supply and demand). The giant question is, can there be a unit such as Value=1? Readers of “The Ascent of Humanity” will be familiar with a tribe of ‘primitives’ called the Piraha. Its members cannot understand counting, cannot be taught numbers above 1. For them, everything is unique, hence 1+1 is an impossible question (as is 1=1), cannot be imagined, its utility cannot be discerned. If there cannot be two of anything, what then is 2? Without “equal”, without a uniform unit of some kind, you cannot have money, nor counting. I see this as a profoundly important observation. An attempt to assess or measure the value of value—e.g., of grain relative to cows—can only occur in societal conditions generating the need for such measurement, including extracting taxes, paying wages, selling slaves, controlling economic activity, explicit tracking of debt and ownership, etc. At its deepest level, therefore, money arises out of the belief that nature can be controlled and measured.

Deeper into the money story we have explicit debt, a direct corollary of “equal”. The notion of an explicitly measurable credit/debt axis, though balancing and balanced, can, I feel, only arise out of the Separation Eisenstein talks of; Self from NotSelf, Me from You, Us from Them, Mine from Yours, Body from Spirit, etc. But why must a benefit be opposed by an exactly equal detriment? Isn’t that pure negation? Can anything be net-created at all? How is there change? We say every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but what is the opposite action of a smile? More fundamentally, what is an action? It is true that if energy goes there, it leaves here, so in that narrow sense credit/debt might be understandable. But what is energy, exactly? Information, perhaps? Are those two one? I don’t think so, and that is a VERY weird thought. On with the article:

Grain was stored in granaries, which served as a form of “bank.” But grain was perishable, so silver eventually became the standard tally representing sums owed. A farmer could go to market and exchange his perishable goods for a weight of silver, and come back at his leisure to redeem this market credit in other goods as needed. But it was still simply a tally of a debt owed and a right to make good on it later. Eventually, silver tallies became wooden tallies became paper tallies became electronic tallies.

Note how perishable is bad. Surely decay can only be a bad thing if we are too frightened of death, age, decrepitude, of the circle of life? This fear too has its roots in Separation. Note also the inescapable progression from store to bank to debt/credit. If I deposit something I own with you (ownership is vital), you owe me it back, or, you hand over an equal amount of something, so as not to owe me. But that something (silver, gold, paper, money, ledger entry) becomes a claim on other people’s product, a.k.a. society’s debt to me generated by my contribution to it as measured by some weight of silver/unit of value. And they must equal, otherwise the process is unfair, unjust, ‘game-able’, etc. But they cannot be equal. Nor can we really measure how much of that contribution was a product of my work, how much is owed to the soil, how much to slaves on my farm, to the sun, rain, weather, etc. The whole process is fraught with difficulty even at the simplest level, and very vulnerable to manipulation and corruption.

Next comes the implicit zero-sum of money-based thinking (which Brown arrives at discussing modern alternative money types):

Consider, for example, one called “Friendly Favors.” The participating Internet community does not have to begin with a fund of capital or reserves, as is now required of private banking institutions. Nor do members borrow from a pool of pre-existing money on which they pay interest to the pool’s owners. They create their own credit, simply by debiting their own accounts and crediting someone else’s. If Jane bakes cookies for Sue, Sue credits Jane’s account with 5 “favors” and debits her own with 5. They have “created” money in the same way that banks do, but the result is not inflationary. Jane’s plus-5 is balanced against Sue’s minus-5, and when Sue pays her debt by doing something for someone else, it all nets out. It is a zero-sum game.

Something bugs me about all this. There are two important money-related things happening when Jane bakes cookies for Sue. One is the dead material, including the energy, used to bake the cookies. The other is the effect doing such has on Jane’s and Sue’s (‘friendly’) relationship. How would this market process sound to us if we were to discover Jane and Sue are in fact sisters? In what way is baking someone cookies a favour if it is immediately ‘paid for’ with an exactly corresponding debt? Any potential gratitude disappears into the hole called “-5 favors”. Sue need feel no gratitude to Jane whatsoever, since now she explicitly owes the Friendly Favors community 5 favours. And what if those favours were iPads, or houses? How many cookie-favours equal one house-favour? And yet the idea of money as a favour is powerful.

Inescapable in a money-system is a unit of account, which needs market-trading to be organic and flexible (Value cannot = 1), which at least implies competition and profit, profit being reward for success, which is part of sorting the good ideas from the bad. We cannot escape failure (and shouldn’t try to), which with an explicit money-measure means indebtedness, which tends to accumulate, which is something no one wants happening to them (The Stick). Logically an accumulation of wealth must also occur (The Carrot), potentially (always?) followed by corruption aimed at keeping the playing field favouring the successful (since they’ve ‘proven’ themselves successful, this is of course justified; ‘survival of the fittest’ and all that), and so on. And history delivers this pattern again and again, with excessive income gaps preceding breakdown and revolution. Can we escape history's rhyme? Should we? Sort of and sort of. Neither money nor poverty can buy you love or joy, and the oscillations they set up are increasingly destructive. We risk our own extinction in pursuit of an illusion. The pattern has gone global.

Surely, then, the area of concern should be trading itself, or, more accurately, the paradigm and social infrastructure in which trading takes place, the functions and expectations it fulfils. At this point reference to Marshall Sahlins’ work on reciprocity would be helpful.

Sahlins ("Stone Age Economics" p193ff) divides reciprocity into three types; generalised, balanced and negative. Generalised reciprocity is ‘pure’ gift-giving with no expectation of return. Balanced reciprocity might be transparent agreements between clans or friends where the exchange is as equal as can be; no profit allowed at the cost of the partner, mutual profit being the point. Negative reciprocity includes tricks and subterfuge, what in economics might be called “information asymmetry”, such that maximum profit is sought at the expense of the partner.

Trading can only be about negative reciprocity, if such profit is its goal. The persistence of the myth that ‘free’ markets deliver maximum social good shows us how far we still must go to see our species as one family whose members should engage only in generalized and balanced reciprocity. Large, differential profit is still the sign of good business, the indicator of success, and by the dubious logic of economics business success leads inexorably to a successful society. And yet isn’t it by now abundantly clear that the Invisible Hand is a failed myth, that trickle down was a cynical and empty promise?

Reorganizing our paradigm to provide a framework in which trade and exchange can include investment of accumulated wealth yet be free of negative reciprocity will not be easy (at the simple level, Friendly Favors is a case of balanced reciprocity, but I don’t see how it could scale up). The challenge I see is how, even in crude outline, to walk the path towards a resource-based economy. Parts of it will be negative interest rates (demurrage), guaranteed income (social dividend), re-localization (the break up of the state), but what is clearer and clearer to me is that, from here, we cannot know what a resource-based economy will actually look like. For example, if money is a promise somehow denoted by a unit of account, perhaps we will never do without it. Will our language one day be free of “Thanks, I owe you one”? I doubt it, but who knows.

I’ve wandered off in a direction Ellen Brown probably wouldn’t have foreseen as a response to her article. No short article can cover all the bases, nor do I agree with anyone on everything (not even with myself), and yet I have a hard time disagreeing with Ellen Brown’s conclusion, which may surprise some of my readers:

“We have emerged from the financial crisis with new clarity: Money today is simply credit. When the credit is advanced by a bank, when the bank is owned by the community, and when the profits return to the community, the result can be a functional, efficient, and sustainable system of finance.”

Even treading the path to a RBE will require a new definition of money, and a new role for our banks—neither can be switched off over night, probably never. Whatever fulfils the function of a bank—which should be democratically redistributing community-accumulated wealth back into the community—whether that entity is internet-based, or located in an actual building, that function is inescapable, even should there be no money in the way we understand money today. What seems inescapable, and healthy, is a transparent method for democratically managing the excess fruits (profits) of the community’s efforts, a system we can trust because it is open, clear, simple to understand, and staffed by people we know and can talk to if need be. Local is therefore key. Guaranteed income is likewise key for those of us who, for whatever reason, are not quite as ‘useful’ to the economic sphere of the community as others. What may not happen is a forgotten, poverty-drenched sector of society that can find no way to dignity, and becomes alien at the edge of life. What may also not happen, is that the economic sphere is thought of as the most important.

(Here are some rough thoughts in reaction to this post:

Money is a promise frozen as an exchangeable debt which has utility proportionate to society's need to trade goods and services in some kind of market. If trade is unnecessary, so is money.

"Money is a promise" to pay. To pay what? Goods and services? Kinda. Couldn't we say that goods and services are promises to pay money? Bank of England notes are promises to pay the bearer the amount denoted on them. This is incomprehensible, but because it is everywhere and state-sanctioned we accept it unquestioningly.

Money is a moment-to-moment enabler of the belief that it is a promise to repay a debt--it works! If I have 'earned' money, I have 'earned' promises from society to hand over those goods and services of equal value I choose to purchase. The money I hold is society's debt to me. It is an indication of a relationship, a standing between me and society as measured by credit/debt.

Banks of the western model profit from this debt/credit accounting/monitoring via usury. Should they? They are providing a service, so why should they not be rewarded? They should be, but that line of inquiry is a dead end. Why money? Because trade? Why make explicit an accounting of debt and credit? Because trade? Why trade? Scarcity. Labour. Property.

If banking were automated, it would need only to be fed the amount of energy it needs to run. The admins sorting out the inevitable problems would have to be paid though! By whom? By society. Society would owe them a debt. What if those admins had fun doing their work, and needed no explicit reward, as in open source software? What if work done to keep the system going were rewarded generally by the functioning of a RBE? What if debt and credit were not explicitly tracked? What if it were culturally understood that we all benefit from doing what we can to keep such a system going, hence there would be no need for a money-accounting as an explicit attempt to measure value and track credit/debt. We need only track resources and ecosystem health. For starters, value cannot be measured. Attempting to do so has proven vulnerable to all sorts of heinous and unforeseen side-effects. Because money-rich is better than money-poor, having (explicit) money as part of society becomes a pressure to game the system so as to get rich and stay rich.)

Money, Debt, Reserves, Money and Debt

2011-08-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

[ADDENDUM (yes, here at the top!): This post contains factual errors which were pointed out to me by Sigi. Happily (in my eyes anyway) my error, when corrected, does not lead to a different conclusion. The voluminous comments to this post are therefore a very important part of it. And, no doubt, I shall be returning to this topic and MMT generally, in due course. 22.08.2011]

I had a wee exchange last week (I think) with rebeleconomist over at Naked Capitalism, who suggested I did not understand that banks have reserves backing their loans (or some such formulation of same). Rebeleconomist appears to support, or think sound, the current money creation system of FRB (fractional reserve banking). Today I had a look at Steve Keen’s “The Roving Cavaliers of Credit” again, wanting to brush up on the data of money creation upon seeing it referenced in Eisenstein’s “Sacred Economics”, so copy-and-pasted the article into a word document at work (naughty me) for leisurely perusal. As I reached the bottom of the web page I noticed , scrolling into view, a comment-exchange between Steve Keen and “Spike1606”, along the lines of ‘the amount of money in existence at worst only equals debt, but mostly exceeds it’. Steve Keen appeared to agree with this assessment (the chat happened early April this year) despite his article demonstrating the opposite. He also claimed not to be expert enough on the fine details of Central Banks and commercial banking generally. I was shocked. I still am. Naturally I ran straight to Wikipedia.

“Within almost all modern nations, special institutions (such as the Federal Reserve System in the United States, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the People's Bank of China, and the Bank of Japan) exist which have the task of executing the monetary policy and often acting independently of the executive. In general, these institutions are called central banks and often have other responsibilities such as supervising the smooth operation of the financial system. There are several monetary policy tools available to a central bank to expand the money supply of a country: decreasing interest rates by fiat [encourage lending—Toby]; increasing the monetary base [government borrowing—Toby]; and decreasing reserve requirements [encourage lending—Toby]. All have the effect of expanding the money supply.

The primary tool of monetary policy is open market operations. This entails managing the quantity of money in circulation through the buying and selling of various financial assets, such as treasury bills, government bonds, or foreign currencies. Purchases of these assets result in currency [synonymous with “money” it seems—Toby] entering market circulation (while sales of these assets remove money from circulation).

Usually, the short term goal of open market operations is to achieve a specific short term interest rate target. In other instances, monetary policy might instead entail the targeting of a specific exchange rate relative to some foreign currency, the price of gold, or indices such as Consumer Price Index. For example, in the case of the USA the Federal Reserve targets the federal funds rate, the rate at which member banks lend to one another overnight. The other primary means of conducting monetary policy include: (i) Discount window lending (as lender of last resort); (ii) Fractional deposit lending (changes in the reserve requirement); (iii) Moral suasion (cajoling certain market players to achieve specified outcomes); (iv) "Open mouth operations" (talking monetary policy with the market). The conduct and effects of monetary policy and the regulation of the banking system are of central concern to monetary economics.” [My emphasis.]

The middle paragraph is key. Though brief and incomplete it wields the jargon of banking in precisely the manner which so confuses the layman (me included). What is money? All sorts of things, like M0, M1, M2 and so on? Sort of. Is it debt? Not according to orthodox economics. The money which is really really money is “high powered money” (see italicized sentence in quote below). Hence selling debt-instruments into the economy takes ‘money’ out of the economy in exchange for bonds, treasuries, etc. What would that ‘money’ otherwise be doing? Creating inflation, one assumes—in that it is (part of) commercial banks’ reserves which enable the extension of credit—hence the need to remove it from the economy. Is it exclusively high powered money which is removed from the economy when these sales occur? How could anyone know? High powered money is not marked to denote it as such, though I suppose its ‘initiating existence’ in particular accounts at commercial banks is a kind of marking. If these accounts were repositories only for transactions with the Federal Reserve, and if bonds and treasuries bought from the Fed could only be purchased with money out of these accounts, that might be a way of tying high powered money directly to such federal monetary operations. And yet even if things were that tight, such money, though “high powered”, was created as debt and is owed back to someone, somewhere.

So what is high powered money? Wiki again:

“In modern economies, relatively little of the money supply is in physical currency. For example, in December 2010 in the U.S., of the $8853.4 billion in broad money supply (M2), only $915.7 billion (about 10%) consisted of physical coins and paper money. The manufacturing of new physical money is usually the responsibility of the central bank, or sometimes, the government's treasury.

Contrary to popular belief, money creation in a modern economy does not directly involve the manufacturing of new physical money, such as paper currency or metal coins. Instead, when the central bank expands the money supply through open market operations (e.g. by purchasing government bonds), it credits the accounts that commercial banks hold at the central bank (termed high powered money). Commercial banks may draw on these accounts to withdraw physical money from the central bank. Commercial banks may also return soiled or spoiled currency to the central bank in exchange for new currency.” [My emphasis.]

(I suspect that 10% figure is quite deliberate, or dependent on whichever definition of money is required to produce it; everywhere else I see assertions of 3-5%. Perhaps it needs to be 10% because FRB requirements are, classically speaking, 10%. Neat, huh?)

So, “purchase of these assets” involves “high powered money”, which is money credited to accounts at commercial banks, money which can be notes and coins. Where does this money come from? Thin air in effect, but in terms of being ‘backed’, it originates from the Government—not from commercial banks—that is, it is backed by The People’s future labour. The CB ‘creates’ ‘new’ ‘money’ in exchange for acquiring and then selling on government debt (in the form of bonds, treasuries etc.). So this “high powered money” originates as debt. This “high powered money” is (part of) the “reserves” of commercial banks.

But what does that mean, "reserves"? In which accounts? Government accounts, business accounts, private accounts … bank accounts! So that money belongs to the various account holders, not to the bank, and yet it represents reserves, debts which are assets (or is that the other way around?). Furthermore, all high powered money is owed by the government to the central bank (or other owners of the initiating debt instrument) upon maturity of the debt (plus interest of course). Who owns the central bank? That is the topic of many books, but private interests it is, otherwise it is The People borrowing from themselves at interest. Which is weird. Even the British Central Bank, “purchased” by the Labour government shortly after the second world war, was paid for by borrowed money which came from unnamed entities. Do you think the British Government have paid that debt off? Austria’s central bank was recently nationalised. I wonder where the government got the money to buy it. Perhaps from the ECB. Who owns that? Smaller European central banks. And so on.

So “high powered money” originates as debt, becomes “reserves” which are monies owned by account holders and owed by the government to holders of the corresponding debt instruments, “reserves” which act as a base from which new money can be lent into existence in the commercial sphere by commercial banks. And loaned money can buy things, so always ends up in some seller's account and can be exchanged for notes and coins. I.e., commercial bank credit-money can be 'transformed' into high powered money. Throughout the system, the monies mingle with rampant abandon. Some of it might be in your pocket right now, or in your bank account. And, legally, you own it, owe it to nobody. And yet it is owed, by someone, somewhere.

(And this is only the conventional theory. “The Roving Cavaliers of Credit” demonstrates that it is actually commercial banks which initiate expansion of the money supply. The research the article cites shows how the central bank is forced, from time to time, to fill the holes in commercial bank balance sheets in order to keep the system going. (Also known as TBTF.))

In the end, money is either created as an explicit debt, or it is not. This is an inescapable binary. Whether we reference reserves or high powered money, treasuries, gilts, or notes and coins, we are denoting money created somehow. The differences are of liquidity, or ease of use in economic exchange. Money does not grow on trees (or does it?—are not economies as natural as trees, are trees ‘lazy?’), so, logically, must be created by something somehow. Is it owed back to its source (plus interest), or isn’t it? If, at every step of the way, ‘money’ is created as a debt, and furthermore as a debt bearing interest, then the amount of ‘money’ out there cannot be more than the debt owed. Money is always debt if it is created as debt. And because of interest, principal must be less than what is owed. P < P+I. Always. The only way to assert otherwise is to have jargon definitions of ‘money’ in its various forms, such that only “high powered money” is money, and the rest is somehow vapour, or “nets to zero”, or is ‘credit’ to be expunged, etc., and yet even with that concession, with reserve requirements at around 10% (allegedly), the claim that ‘money’ exceeds debt in the system seems untenable to me. Bank run, anyone?

Look at the third paragraph of the first quote, which informs us the Central Bank’s goal is control of short term interest rates (with an eye to inflation). The interest rate is like the gas flame under the economy’s pot. Control it, and you control the intensity at which the economy cooks. That’s the theory. What we see today after years of historically low interest rates (“cheap money”) and anemic to zero ‘growth,’ is that this theory is obviously insufficient. Japan is a case in point. The system ‘works’ when the economy can grow, but breaks down when it can’t. That’s happening now, with government repeatedly forced to borrow on behalf of us all. The explanation for this phenomenon is debt collapse in an economy at peak debt levels (including a slowly changing Zeitgeist), which equates to a collapse of the (effective) money supply, in an economy which is not growing, which means it can no longer borrow more money into existence. All that fresh “high powered money” out there finding no matching economic activity to make it ‘real,’ except in commodities, stocks and other stock market shenanigans, the rises of which we might see as deferred inflation. Apparently, all those jargon distinctions are of no real use. Label it as you will, money created as debt is debt.

What backs debt? Put another way; what backs money? Certainly not reserves or high powered money, since that originates as debt. Money does not back money (yes it does: “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five pounds”!), as gold does not back gold. Perhaps a thought-exercise would be helpful:

Imagine I create a trillion TDs (TobyDollars) at home for my family to become an economy at last. There it is, TD1tr. Sitting on the kitchen table, twinkling in the moonlight. What is it valuing? At first, absolutely nothing. I have to spend it into our wee economy for it to have any meaning. Before we Russells have economic activity between ourselves, the money has zero ‘value,’ or no utility. Maybe I start paying my daughters for smiles, and they pay me for hugs and play time together. (I won’t list what my wife and I might pay each other for. Too boring.) At first, a hug might cost TD100m, a smile TD10m, but as the number of things we do for one another ‘grows’ (tying each other’s shoe laces, pouring each other’s milk, buttering each other’s toast, massages, story telling, use of the piano, etc.), so the price per exchange falls in classic, market style.

What backs money is therefore economic activity, or buying and selling. So if we are to prevent inflation, when we create new money it needs to be met by some amount of new economic activity (new goods and services), as equal in ‘value’ to that money as possible. So, in an economy in which the money supply is forced to expand (P < P+I is an equation for a Ponzi or Pyramid Scheme), growth of economic activity backs money (or debt, the terms are synonymous). In an economy where money is created as debt, such that the created amount is destroyed upon final repayment, leaving only the interest behind in the hands of the lender, we have a screaming need for constantly increasing (on average) lending and borrowing. This is why recessions and depressions are Bad, and growth is Good. This is why economic activity is Good.

And even if money is not created as debt—as in my example above—the (household) economy becomes instantly ‘indebted’ or beholden to money as soon as it is there to be used—why else create it. Money is, in its broader systemic effects, a claim on and a systemic pressure to engage in economic activity, or price-based exchange (buying and selling). The economic principle of thrift we all know—living within one’s means—is in fact impossible to adhere to when money is designed in such a way as to demand growth, since, in time, this can only lead to humanity demanding too much energy from its environment, as well as asking it to process too much waste. And since growth appears to be forced upon us by social hierarchies such as nation-states and corporations (in their current forms), which, in deeper history was selected for as a consequence of attempting to control nature through farming, it is clear that we, as a species, still have a lot to learn about true economics, what we might call the ecology of economics. Right now there’s too much jargon and not enough sense.

Hierarchy and Anarchy

2011-08-12T21:56:00.000-07:00

[Warning: this is tentative, exploratory material!]

It is not ‘human nature’—via the heady cocktail of ambition, greed and selfishness—which makes hierarchy inevitable, it is environmental complexity. ‘Human nature’, coarsely understood as just defined, is a variable-complex of low relevance in the generating of hierarchical social systems, and is meaningless when notionally removed from its supporting environmental networks in an attempt to see it ‘for what it is.’ I argue here that we need not refer to this Hobbesian ‘beast within’ when seeking to understand social forms. Another line of inquiry bears more succulent fruit.

Premise: Not only can there be no such thing as equality across the universal spectrum (except in the abstract world of language and imagination), we should never even try to establish such in pursuit of social good. Just as the Piraha cannot count above one—even when shown how by concerned anthropologists—so we should recognize and celebrate the uniqueness of every single thing, at every scale, everywhere. As one consequence of having begun to look at reality in this light, I am beginning to entertain the possibility that the hierarchy-anarchy dichotomy I have been battling with in my thinking for some time now, should be thought of as nothing more than a cultural illusion, a transitional conflict generated by ignorance. These supposedly antithetical social arrangements are but projections from out of our cultural knowledge of Universe, knowledge which is painfully incomplete, biased and inaccurate.

For example, isn’t it always and only the case that, as Universe generates more data-detail out of its ever-changing reality, ‘tunes’ its fractal-resolution ever finer, it consequently generates yet more data-detail in a perpetual, multifaceted whirring around dynamic ‘balance?’ (See note on entropy below.) On our scale (humans and human societies are embedded subsets of Universe), the more information we discern then process and manipulate, the more we generate in the very heat of our efforts to understand, interpret and ‘control.’ We are as much a part of Universe as stars, asteroids and planets. So isn’t it the case that society becomes more ‘complex’ necessarily (albeit not in a linear fashion, but over time)? Musn’t this complexity give rise to social hierarchies?

Therefore, and to focus prosaically on the theme at hand, the chance for small human groups to remain forever ‘egalitarian’—a societal mode we project onto them from within our cultural and historical experience of hierarchy—is, from my newly emerging point of view, zero, not because of human nature and ‘born greedy’ arguments, but simply because the wild mess of environmental (or bio-social) pressures, stirred up with a societal soup of any complexity, is totally uncontrollable. Inescapably, people (trees, flowers, lions, antelope, ants) of varying qualities emerge from the environment producing them, not because of genetics per se, but because of the necessary complexity and vital unpredictability of the web of life. Genetics are a subset of and are embedded in Universe. They mean absolutely nothing whatsoever outside their context, their enmeshed reality. The manner in which genes copy themselves into ‘endless’ iterations of themselves is powered and slowly altered by external environmental circumstances beyond their control. Indeed there is no control, there are no actions; there is only response and reaction. Agency is an illusion.

Let’s look at two of the techniques for sustaining egalitarianism. Teasing: How can teasing to suppress alphas be effective for all time in the face of all that information ‘out there,’ to be discovered and interpreted? No way can we all know enough about everything to deal with ‘experts’ from multiple fields. The ‘You don't know what you're talking about!’ card can be played, and defended, increasingly successfully, as societal complexity increases. Teasing is effective in small groups where there is open access to manageable amounts of culturally generated data about reality, thereafter it becomes ever weaker. Imagining for a moment I could get sufficient ‘face time,’ how would I tease a Margaret Thatcher or a Tony Blair, a Joe Biden or Lloyd Blankfein to humility and humble acceptance of ‘egalitarian’ principles? Not only do I not have sufficient power, I have but limited experience of their worlds, and they would not understand where I was coming from. Killing: And as a pacifist, before even looking at the extreme difficulty and counter-productivity of such a solution, I cannot advocate killing people who disagree with me, or who have a more ambitious personality. Even people like Lloyd Blankfein. (You can relax now, Lloyd.)

Perhaps even more fundamentally, why would nature, via human behaviour, select for ‘egalitarian’ societies at the scale of hunter gatherers? Is nature moral? Does it care about fairness? Perhaps, but not as I caricature it here; nothing is that simple. Christopher Boehm confronts hierarchy and egalitarianism in “Hierarchy in the Forest”. He points out the life-and-death need for total trust among all members of the group, e.g., on potentially deadly hunting trips. If any member of the tribe has personal ambitions, that person cannot be trusted in such delicate situations and must therefore either be humbled out of their selfish egotism, or killed, for the sake of the group. ‘Primitive’ egalitarian societies are a harsh matter of survival in dangerous, non-surplus conditions, and have nothing to do with ‘rights’ or other political niceties. The egalitarian mode we perceive them as having 'adopted,' arises organically from the environmental conditions confronting the group. Hence, with the arrival of farming, surplus, private property, alongside the increasing complexity of social life, egalitarianism simply becomes the less effective social construct. For this stage of the analysis, morality is irrelevant, as is human nature, except that human nature is social and intelligently adaptive.

To recap, social hierarchy could be said to be an organic consequence of increases in generated intellectual information leading to increases in social complexity, coupled with changed environmental circumstances and challenges such as farming, surplus and private property. Over broader tracts of time, and speaking more generally still, the more complex things get, the more information we generate as we further understand Universe, cumulatively—standing on the shoulders of taller and taller giants—the less able we are to deploy effective teasing (and other) tactics to keep the playing field level, and the less appropriate egalitarianism becomes. An egalitarian social mode becomes an impossibility via person-to-person teasing in social and environmental conditions far different from ‘hand-to-mouth’ hunter gatherer tribes. Furthermore, as hierarchies establish, killing alpha males becomes harder, as they are surrounded by ‘hangers-on’, who become an early ‘army,’ ‘police,’ etc. Not to mention that specialization means upending the hierarchy sinks you too. Having specialized, you cannot survive on your own in the wild. Hierarchy breeds dependency on it. A hierarchy composed of equally abled jacks of all trades is illogical.

But of course the story does not end with the supposed ‘success’ of the hierarchical forms we see around us today. It just so happens that human social hierarchies such as nation-states and corporations are wired to grow perpetually as part of their design (and we should see corporations as a smooth ‘progression’ from the nation-state to a form that can grow beyond nation-state borders, while states provide the framework for population growth). They are therefore fundamentally self-destructive at increasing environmental cost, likely to the point of global eco-collapse if not arrested.

Today, we therefore have two (interrelated) choices if we wish to survive in civilizational form (facing, as we do, new environmental challenges such as peak oil, technological unemployment, peak debt, global warming, and other problems unprecedented in human history):

1. develop an anarchic socioeconomic infrastructure which permits the ad hoc emergence of (short-term?) hierarchical social organizations, which are systemically prevented (not forced) from bedding down, dominating and growing in reach and power (goal-oriented or project-based hierarchies); and/or

2. insist on pure anarchic social systems and work out new ways of preventing the ‘unwanted’ emergence of hierarchies in a modern, complex setting.

Right off the bat I have a problem with “insist” (a word I put there for precisely that reason!). It is totalitarian, profoundly divisive, is the deepest antithesis of what a new social form, from this point looking forward, ought, logically, to be about. Because it divides deeply to insist on a solution, insistence renders impossible the ever-emergent consensus, however fractious, an anarchic system would require, would strive to learn how to build. To insist on anarchy and only anarchy is to doom it at the outset. 'Mature' anarchy can only emerge organically from conditions conducive to its emergence (nothing unusual there!). And grass doesn’t grow faster if you shout at it. Hence my continuing interest in a resource-based economy, in which the infrastructure itself is sustainably organized (point 1.) to distribute the necessities (plus many luxuries) to all people everywhere. This infrastructure is a necessary precondition for generating the base conditions of anarchy (egalitarianism), out of which soil ad hoc and short-term hierarchical arrangements, perhaps even ‘institutions,’ can grow and then dissolve, at need, without being able to accrue power. Key is the ‘guarantee’ of a solid and environmentally friendly life-ground, a base providing everyone with the ‘equal’ opportunity to participate and contribute. The degree to which one enjoys one’s life will be up to each individual ‘equally’ (which translates to a loose definition of ‘freedom’ I can live with). The more one constructively gives, the richer one’s life becomes. Contribution rewards by definition, even when it includes failure and set backs.

Such a socioeconomics could include no fiscal debt in the formal sense, no private property, no bondage in the explicit sense of money and formal monetary accounting. Each of us would be obliged/free to play his or her part in the organic and ongoing rebalancings of Universe, adapted and reacted to in an emergent fashion. Without appeal to any sense of fairness or morality, we would get out, more or less, what we put in. And that is a morality I can believe in. A bio-diverse ‘equality’ I can take seriously.

However, in chicken-and-egg fashion, building such an infrastructure first requires what I’ve been calling here an ‘anarchic’ set up, that is, a society accustomed to and politically mature enough to cope with locally organized self-governance via direct democracy and consensus building. We are nowhere near that place. We are political and emotional babies. Before we can even begin to want to build a global RBE infrastructure, we have to re-localize, nucleate across the planet into a cultural sense of ourselves as but one species of many on planet Earth, and establish ‘self-sufficient’ communities interconnected via ‘harmonizing’ Internet-like software and databases capable of global resource tracking and management. Out of this a RBE might emerge, though the path will be stony indeed, before we even consider how difficult the first step will be.

To conclude, the two listed options are in fact one—minus the word “insist”— or are at least interconnected. We begin where we can, as discussed by David Graeber, to construct anarchic social organizations, slowly improve our consensus-finding techniques, and freely disseminate the wisdom we learn. Show ourselves and the world how it’s done. Invite participation from others. Remain open. Stay honest. Believe. And accept that hierarchical social organizations are unavoidable, even within anarchy. Nature is fundamentally anarchic with hierarchical arrangements arising from and collapsing back into it. Anarchy is the soil which enables hierarchy. Seeing them as opposites is wrong.

[Note to self: Complexity cannot increase infinitely. There will be retrenchments, failed-experiments, collapses leading to profound and broad changes of direction. In the manner of Keep It Simple, Stupid, systems can be too complex. Complexity does not equal wisdom. Accumulations of wisdom include rebalancings of complexity and simplicity as Universe ‘progresses’ ‘blindly’ through its many experiments with different forms of life.]

[Note to others: Entropy is not the sole fundamental property of Universe in my opinion. There are many, though change is the only constant! If entropy were the core property of Universe I could not be typing this. The self-organizational processes necessary, over the vast tracts of time from the alleged Big Bang till now, to engender life on earth and now human society and culture out of ‘chaos’ cannot be ignored. They’re here. We are it. Universe did this, and this miraculous (inexplicable) ‘accomplishment’ is not the result of entropy.]

Postcard from Everywhere

2011-08-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

Holidays are always an aberration, a deviation from the day-to-day. Yet they’re also a smoothly stressed continuation in that you cannot leave yourself behind, and when a parent on a family holiday, your little group travels with you too, psychological baggage dragging holiday luggage across foreign soils. With this first contradiction firmly in place, I can proceed to the second: I always enjoy holidays, even when I don’t (and especially in hindsight). That factoid should tell you quite a lot about me.

Ah, Asia! Hierarchy-Central, materialist fleshpot for Caucasian rejectamenta, with shops slicking the bustling cities like too much sauce across a dish of cheap cuisine. Our last trip eastwards was December to January 2007-8. Since then I’ve changed my view of humanity and human society about as much as is conceivably possible for a 40-something leading a ‘normal’ middle-class life as father of a healthy, nuclear family of four. This time Asia met my new eyes and troubled me deeply. If I have a hard time selling steady state growth and resource-based economics in Europe and America; in Asia, where my contacts are either rich elites or poor home-help, such ideas are seen as little more than the deranged pontifications of society’s failures and loons. That said, the twenty-somethings and younger of those rich families (I’m talking very anecdotally here), with their exposure to the Internet, are showing signs of open-mindedness. Perhaps wealth’s glitter is rubbing off. Even in glittering Hong Kong.

Nevertheless, what was brought home to me most forcefully is the flat out impossibility of an idea like a RBE or even a demurrage currency, or even slowing growth down, being greeted as reasonable or worthy of discussion. My conversations with business people and bankers, as well as with their poor staff, was a strong reminder of how big the world is, how tightly united around the Story of Money (or what Eisenstein calls The Story of the Self) it is. Of course, this impression is hardly the result of rigorous research, even though the sample of people I talked to is representative of both rich and poor. Nevertheless, I don’t think it is wildly presumptuous of me to think of these conversations (and other impressions from TV news and other media outlets) as accurately informative and worthy of note.

Because direct democracy and other anarchic social forms strike me as necessary for humanity’s survival, the information from The Philippines, Hong Kong and China was sobering. Hierarchy is baked deeper into their cultural cakes than ours, even though we are still systemically yoked to it. Despite the ‘birth of the free individual’ preceding and subsequent to the French and American revolutions having done plenty to soften western culture to the idea of direct democracy and therefore to anarchy as a system, hierarchy and the Hobbesian monopoly-on-power the state is, are as endemic to the status quo as ever. After all, a “monopoly on power” is what the state is, by definition. Any solution within the context of the state is a perpetuation of hierarchy, elitism, scarcity and zero-sum competition. Truly translating the historical logic of the West’s revolutions will take further revolutions. In Asia doubly so. And everywhere the poor dream of being rich. For ‘rich’ to mean something, some majority or other has to be poor.

So the old conundrum seems tougher than ever. Humanity faces global challenges it must meet cohesively, under some loosely uniting vision, yet culturally we are fractious, stubborn, scattered, and suspicious of both The Enemy Other and The New. To engender a vision capable of uniting us, however loosely, we must begin locally. Translating local solutions of some anarchic form to others across the planet is proving very difficult, even with the Internet. Without it, such communication is simply impossible. Freely disseminating information is key, learning how different cultures understand your information is hard, but also key. No isolated anarchic system can hope to survive, nor could it hope to fight off attacks from corporations and nation-states eager to thwart it should it become too attractive to growing numbers of humans. Hard-earned wisdoms must be shared, successes and failures must be ‘advertised’ to all so that each can help all, rather than each be at war with all. A mighty challenge which will require on-the-fly development of a new cultural skill-set.

A further conundrum, one which concerns me deeply, is the birth and subsequent death of The Individual. This Cartesian mote of consciousness—potent, creative, active—does not exist as conceived, yet the idea of selfhood is, culturally speaking, a necessary precursor to empathy, which is a necessary precursor to ‘selflessly selfish’ interactions with other humans and the environment generally. The West is ‘ahead’ of Asia in this regard. Think Japan’s reactions to Elvis Presley and rock and roll. Think Hong Kong and China in the 1920s and 30s flirting with Western clothes and music. And yet the more unquestioning, almost subservient adherence to ‘The Way Things Are’ I detect throughout Asian cultures is also representative of a concern for the group above the individual ‘selfless selfishness’ implies. The dark side of this is the power of the state, ends justifying means, the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, and so on. How powerful should the group be relative to the individual? There is no simple answer. Death is anyway inevitable no matter what death ‘really’ is, and we fear it too much. Do we respect the famous Right to Life too much? The autarky I think is historically upon us, which we are obliged to embrace, upholds the ‘freedom’ of the ‘individual.’ Yet for such not to be a Hobbesian war of each against all, as predicted by the state, there must also be a very clear recognition of the primacy of the collective, as a network enabling the ‘freedom’ of each of us.

That is quite a conundrum.

There is no such thing as an individual. Conception of such first requires millennia of abstract language and culture, both of which are impossible absent society—no solitary wolf-child could come up with either. The word “self-conscious” turned up in the late 1600s; that’s a lot of social history and development as preparation for the concept. Society gave birth to the idea of individuality, just as it gave birth to the idea of empathy, a word perhaps 150 years old (it comes from the German “Einfühlung” which first appeared in the mid 1800s I think) which begins to dissolve the boundaries of that which spawned it. In that dissolution, perhaps, an ‘inter-individual’ can emerge, a paradox to us now, but hopefully as obvious as breathing to some future culture. Whatever future forms society evolves for itself must remain misty and frustratingly incomprehensible for now. We push forward not knowing where we are headed, only knowing we strive to do our best for humanity and biosphere alike.

Escape's End

2011-06-28T06:34:00.000-07:00

Make us in your father’s image.
Break us on your wheel.
Shape us with the binds tight
to your fierce love. We turn

at your command, around and around,
head over heels, dazzled with sky.
Against your industrial heat
clouds scatter, rain baulks

at your factory winds,
its promise sent nowhere.
Disgust from your eyes is
the only weather we know,

a tempest driving us on
up out of now, through growth
into the glittering infinity
your cold stars spin anew.

Beneath your crystal frenzy
writhes and slithers the teeming slime
your revulsed frown excites.
In the greying light, growing

confusion and decay.
A disjointedness weeps out
of the left-behind, steeps
as it rots, colours as it kills.

Direction has collapsed. Here
the spinning wheels we are
throw out their high-pitched sound
from which new bonds are spliced

while matter, our very stuff,
coalesces to clones of clones
in the gusting fear. All we know
is somehow, that’s all. Somehow

this is how it is. Yet in forgotten muck
a protest made of oldest time
finds eyes again, slips fingers
onto feminine hands

and smooths itself to life.

Questions and Observations on Hoermann's Proposals

2011-06-22T23:19:00.000-07:00

Well, the last ten or so days have thrown up some thoughts and questions regarding the (very incomplete) Hoermann solutions presented, which I’d like to sketch out here before I wander off over the horizon. I’d be grateful for any responses, since, as I always say, this is up to us, not one guy sitting in his office penning elegant solutions no one has ever tested. Criticism is the lifeblood of getting solid ideas down before real-world experimentation can begin, as is continuing personal involvement in the process. Direct democracy cannot happen unless everyone participates, passionately, wisely, flexibly and maturely. A tall order I know, but there it is.

My thoughts and questions on my two recent Hoermann posts (which represent but a fraction of his proposals, so I could be barking up the wrong trees here) are:

1. Money created in direct and immediate ‘response’ to societal contribution sounds like a must to me. Time Banks do this already, though I’m not sure if the system will be flexible enough to take the load. So how will the appropriate amount (‘price,’ ‘wage’) be quickly and efficiently discovered, across the board? No way can a central authority do this, so the process must be market-based, that is, democratic. In one-to-one exchanges of services, a bit of discussion and bargaining, mixed with experience, should make trade and price discovery easy. Perhaps information from such trades could be fed, upon completion of the transaction, into a database accessible on the Internet (or Internet-like infrastructure). But what about manufactured items like cookers, MP3 players etc., how will ‘price’ for them be discovered, and how does money flow to those who worked on their creation? And when a car is rented, to whom does the ‘money’ flow? To a company? What is a company in the new system (see question 3)? And when people do unpleasant work like rubbish collection, does the community decide how much this is worth, how many points you earn for this? I prefer market solutions (in the correct money system!), so imagine ‘private’ or community-based enterprises providing such civic services, though the devil is indeed in the detail; how might this work? More on this below…

2. If the guaranteed income is an overdraft facility of some type (no interest incurred), is it zeroed monthly to represent a constant income? If an account is net positive by some amount at the end of the month, would that mean that account ‘loses out’ because there was no negative balance to zero out? Or perhaps a separate accounting circuit for guaranteed income might be helpful? Perhaps the electronic units would flow into an individual’s account, but be flagged to expire at the end of the month, in the sense of a 100% demurrage. That way guaranteed income would not accumulate, could not be hoarded. Or, as I’ve read elsewhere (perhaps also translated here at Econosophy), Hoermann hinted that accounts can slip deeper and deeper into negative territory. Perhaps this is limitless. The deeper the negative, the less the person is net-contributing to society, the less healthy, on many levels, that person is. If this negative crosses a particular threshold, a metaphorical red lights goes on, and the Life Guide leaps into action, to find out why the person is not contributing, and tries to re-motivate him or her. The assumption in this paradigm is that it is not at all fulfilling only to take from society, that to be in that imbalance is bad for the soul. I agree with this. We all like to feel needed, to contribute. As such a negative account balance is a helpful source of information.

3. What will companies actually be, legally speaking? What kind of entities? Under what legal terms will people work for them? Ad hoc? Guaranteed income destroys the need for a pension, but such questions as payment for work-based services need to be thought through. Also, how are company profits distributed? I believe such should be equal, but flexibility will be critical. The fewer laws the better.

4. Who rewards Hoermann’s materials scientists? How is the ‘value’ of their contribution determined? How do they get access to the raw materials they need? Who/what ‘owns’ the raw materials? Does this system have any chance at all of success at the national level? Does it have to be global from the get go? Resources are randomly scattered across the planet.

5. How are services like medical assistance paid for? Who pays ambulance drivers? What would hospitals be, legally speaking? To whom would they be answerable? To everyone perhaps, but how? Over what channels?

6. Money creation again. Personally, I picture a YouTube-like affair, where it does not ‘cost’ or incur debt to judge someone’s contribution. Hoermann mentions accounts going up upon a sale, and down upon a purchase. Nothing new there. But isn’t that a zero-sum process? Wouldn’t the balance of all accounts be zero if that were the only way money ‘changed hands’? Well yes, unless purely positive money creation also occurs, perhaps along YouTube-like lines. But how do we do this, and who/what is empowered to? If the money system is to be democratic, then we all should be allowed to create money, albeit not willy-nilly. If people earn more for doing unpleasant work, who pays them, and how much? Let’s say we need a scale. We could start, after much discussion and direct democracy consensus building, with something like this: rubbish collectors earn ten points an hour, sheep shearers 12, slaughter house workers 15, and so on. Then we’d have to set up fair and open mechanisms for recording the numbers of hours worked, and away we go, adjusting and tuning according to supply-and-demand information. Here the points that flow into the workers’ accounts are directly created by their societal contributions. No individuals go into debt as a consequence, except by the back-door of money being a claim on future and existing goods and services. Unspent money is a claim on society’s produce, society’s ‘debt’ to itself. Perhaps this direct democracy process of wage determination would be far trickier with things like brain surgery. Although, in theory at least, direct democratic processes should be able to arrive at flexible consensus even with specialized and highly skilled work. There are issues such as time invested to acquire skills like brain surgery, time spent net-taking from society until one can contribute. But perhaps all it takes is thorough and open discussion of the relevant information, hard as that is. If we don’t manage to set up a ‘deliberate’ or goal-oriented market-like process, we’re left with a centralized, power-based process.

7. A problem I see with the above is the absence of money destruction. The money supply would only expand. This is where tax – forgetting morality for a moment – is so elegant, and, therefore, where state mechanisms have their uses. In MMT tax is characterized as trash. We can think of tax as relieving pressure in the system. I believe, though, this taxation process could be automated, set up democratically, but here, as ever, the devil is in the detail. Who would be taxed and how much? (And is inflation even possible in this system, seeing as it is the antithesis of consumerism?) Could tax-like, pressure-relieving mechanisms be activated by some inflation-threshold. If yes, then how, and from whom would the money be taken? Perhaps another process, other than taxation, could destroy money. Perhaps an aggressive demurrage would progressively kick in if account levels exceeded a certain threshold. In a societal atmosphere not characterized by consumerism and conspicuous consumption this might be an effective pressure-relieving device that could be a design-property of each individual account. In the end, just as an excessive negative represents imbalance, so would an excessive positive. Although, we should not want an absolutely flat account-profile. Sustaining equality of opportunity is what counts. Equality of outcome – the opposite of diversity – is the enemy of life.

8. Trust. Unless the infrastructure enabling and the atmosphere surrounding our social and economic interactions fosters trust, the types of systems suggested above will be ripped apart by deception and fraud. Nothing whatsoever will work differently to today unless the very foundations of what we set up have as their core intent openness, cooperation and trust.

On the death of consumerism briefly. The model we suffer under today goads us into ever increasing consumption levels 24/7. This is a money makes right society; might makes right is for yesteryear. See “The Century of the Self” for further details on how skilled, pervasive and insidious the propaganda – sorry, I mean public relations – machinery is.

In a steady state system we would live to develop ourselves for ourselves and for society, for the fun of it, the challenge of it, to be. Life would not be about ownership and accumulation. Private property would dwindle down to personal trinkets of emotional value, and value would be freed from its narrow materialist confines. Transport, housing, white goods, would all be rented, and if a RBE were to emerge, would just be accessed. This change, from consumerism to (let’s call it) 'contributionism' changes money, and the nature of society’s need for money, so deeply, we can hardly imagine, from our vantage point, what it would be like to live in such a society. GDP growth would no longer be a systemic necessity, cooperation would be more encouraged than competition, advertising would be unnecessary, ditto accountancy, etc. So the framework for addressing these questions and assessing, imaginatively, the ramifications of proposed solutions, cannot be today’s. That makes this process difficult and error prone. Only actual ‘doing’ will yield solid information and feedback.

Hoermann's Ideas for a Possible Way Forward II

2011-06-19T03:14:00.000-07:00

As the WienTV interview is edited to begin with Hoermann answering an unheard question, I will too, although I've started a little way in, cut out his opening comments on “Zeitgeist, Moving Forward”. English speakers can watch the interview if they want though, because there are subtitles. But the subtitles are not good, miss and misrepresent plenty. As with my most recent translation, I've translated WienTVs questions loosely, only attempting to catch the spirit of the question, rather than stay true to every colloquial detail.

Without further ado:

Franz Hoermann: What we today think of as money, a thing we still associate with solidity and material, [or as] a value we pass around among ourselves in exchange, does not actually exist. It is pure information, a number, and needs therefore no medium, not even paper. It could exist, for example, solely on computer disks, which it does, of course, already, and is created there too. This is – if you've been reading between the lines – the problem behind the current financial crisis.

Money is created by a booking entry in private banks. Private banks have a monopoly of money creation. Not central banks, not democracy. And the way in which they extend their balance sheets, always and only with further debt issuance – debt bearing compound interest! – is the root of today's problems. That is, everyone has debt, debt is exploding, exponentially, and [this debt] cannot be paid back.

WienTV: Yours is a very provocative thesis, namely that 2011 will be the end of money. Why?

FH: Well, “the end of money” has multiple meanings. On the one hand, today's money is nothing more than a rule of the game. This rule says that individuals, groups, institutions and states must repay their debts with interest on top. If you take a careful look at this, you'll see that for most industrial nations, this year, the numbers don't add up. What is actually happening with all the Euro Bailouts is nothing more than paying old debts with new debts. These news debts bear, of course, interest. That means we can predict that these debts will explode, that they will be, because of the rules of the game, unpayable. That is the end of money from one perspective.

The second perspective is that the public will finally understand, that what we see as money never actually existed. Money created by book entry can have no substance, and cannot therefore have any intrinsic value. After we've finally come to terms with this, we'll be able to establish something similar to money, namely numbers, with which we can organize human action anew, namely democratically, legally insured, transparently, in a way understood by all, and helpful for human development.

WTV: What will money look like in 2012?

FH: If we're successful, if the international network of scientists I belong to succeeds with the ideas we are putting forward, then [money] would be an electronic accounting unit which has purchasing power. It would only be created as 'payment' for human contribution and skill. People will have individual accounts 'equipped' with a certain 'overdraft facility' which we see as a guaranteed income. [Not sure how this word work – refreshed every month? – Toby] With this people can shop. They'd have purchasing power. Then, for every contribution they bring to the community – networked electronically, organized for production – they'll be rewarded with [further] purchasing power, according to clear and transparent rules, rules which will be changeable at any time.

Our goal is to divide these contributions into two categories, namely pleasant (fun, good for personal development), and unpleasant (chores, boring work that simply must be done). Both categories will be paid, but the unpleasant jobs will be better paid. But, if anyone is especially creative, in that they come up with some solution that leads to their redundancy, and therefore frees up many others from having to perform that unpleasant work, they will receive a 'super premium,' so that they can further develop themselves in other areas.

WTV: Who will be the winners and who the losers in this new system?

FH: Interestingly, since the new form of social organization we propose would not be a zero-sum game – though most people understand this, seeing money as a pot of a finite amount gold coins – we would be able to declare all social classes simultaneous winners, because the system would encourage cooperation. There would be no more competition.

WTV: Are the Internet and Open Source a virtual model for what you propose?

FH: Yes, we see the Internet as the system's infrastructure, and Open Source is a good analogy for it. We can found society as an Open Source Society. A quick example: it won't be necessary for each car manufacturer to produce an entire car (Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Toyota), since this automatically brings them into competition with each other, and they try to do each other down. These manufacturers will [instead] specialize in component manufacture, which, in a 'Lego module concept' will then be assembled into a whole car. This should ensure that cars last for, say, thirty years, since it will be easy to swap out only those 'Lego components' that are actually broken. In this way car companies would work together rather than compete with one another, cooperation instead of competition. This would of course mean redundancies across the board, but this wouldn't be a problem , since they would receive ongoing purchasing power and could develop their personal skills as they so wished, and that at a higher level which would be more useful to society generally.

WTV: Re cooperation instead of competition. I've heard that before –

FH: Yes, the welfare state [laughs]!

WTV: but would this also mean a more environmentally friendly set up?

FH: Yes. Our new money system, as I've already pointed out, consists of electronic numbers which are generated solely by human behaviour [societal contribution]. For inorganic matter, e.g. raw materials or half-finished products, we would set up a separate accounting circuit. These things will not be valued. Inorganic matter, objects, will have no value. Manufacturers will no longer ask for a component to be made of, say, aluminium, they define which criteria the material must have, e.g. rigidity, melting point, etc., and materials specialize will work to meet these demands. So it won't be competition over scarce raw materials, we will focus on functionality instead. People who need it will be provided then with some 'pure material.' Should this fail, new materials will be synthesized, which is the responsibility of the specialists, who would receive bonuses for their work and creativity.

When we pay people only with electronic numbers for their skills and contributions, the advantage is that we automatically have a fair system, since everyone can develop their skills, but not everyone can [work on/benefit from] the legacy of/inheritance from a company.

WTV: Isn't the end of poverty also the end of wealth and therefore communism and bland uniformity?

FH: No. We'll just think in other categories, that's the trick. There won't be rich and poor as we currently have them, there'll just be people in different stages of development. The very young just beginning to develop their skills, people who've been at it a while, people who have taken time out to reconsider their career and look at alternatives. And for all these stage the new bank employees will be there – we call them “Life Guides” – who, almost as psychological coaches, will accompany their charges for life.

WTV: Well, that sounds very utopian –

FH: Indeed! [“Tja!” says Hoermann, which is very hard to translate, kind of like “What can I say, you've got me!”, but I chose “Indeed.” – Toby]

WTV: [Laughs.] It seems to me that the guaranteed income is absolutely essential.

FH: Correct. We can organize this by giving everybody an account via, for example, their social security number. We will all begin with an 'overdraft' range, which has purchasing power, and this represents the guaranteed income. In this system then, those who deliver a product/service see their account increase, those who receive see theirs decrease. This exchange is recorded neutrally as [simple] numbers [without what Hoermann calls “dimension”], so there's no need for suffixes like Dollars or Euros [I believe he thinks of currency as a dimension of the number].

In reality price is nothing more than a value-relationship. The dimension [i.e. currency?] cancels itself out in the relationship. 3 meters to 2 meters [3:2] is 1.5 without need for a further [explanatory dimension]. Historically, Marks and Krone etc. are nothing more than seals of dominance which assigned to the sphere of the sovereign control of economic activity generally. After the French Revolution and the usurpation of the nobility, upon which money creation was taken from the royalty and handed over to the banks, the banks maintained the seals as a way of empowering their money, or affecting consensus to use it as money, and then called their money a thing with intrinsic value. Materialism arises out of this construct, that is, the currency misrepresented as commodity money, with which currency speculators can excite [make volatile] exchange differences, and from this generate unearned income. Firms in the real economy on the other hand suffer from this volatility, are forced therefore to hedge against it, an insurance which the banks again benefit from. That is, in brief, the context for all this.

So while we understand the numerical [accounting] unit as a thing with intrinsic value, we are all confronted with these paradoxes, such as particularly successful nations suffering as their currency gains in value, and vice versa, from which, actually, only counterproductive effects emerge which can only benefit speculators.

WTV: How should we proceed as collapse unfolds? What should people do?

FH: Firstly we need to disconnect our sense of happiness, which is just a feeling, from property ownership and bind it to self-determining the shape and pattern of our lives, so that we have more control over the development of our skills and activities, and this will be the new definition of happiness. The money we have today should be spent as quickly as possible into the real economy, which people are in fact doing anyway – which has been misunderstood by conventional economics and interpreted as a recovery! Should currencies really break – which is probably something we cannot avoid – it would be enough if we reassigned money creation, that is one account for everyone, to, for example, a social ministry. We all have social security numbers. For the new electronic banking system we need nothing more than a new bank sort code and can use existing infrastructure. Every citizen receives, via his or her social security number, an account in the new system, money creation then becomes the responsibility of the social ministry, and with that we can dispose of the finance ministry [Treasury I guess – Toby].

So, the rest of the interview, which is just one question and answer, you can check out for yourselves. It's about how to treat the criminal (elites), which Hoermann answers along the lines of, we seek no enemies, we're trying to establish a solution everyone can be more or less happy with.

And that's it from me for a while. I'm off for six weeks ten days from now, and need next weekend to prepare for the holiday, attend to domestic stuff. I hope the repetition here of some ideas is not too bothersome. Hoermann speaks fast and says plenty, and one thought leads quickly to another and each depends on former and future expressions. In that sense the more the better (and editing it is a bloody nightmare). Also worthy of note, again, is that these ideas are suggestions for us to take and run with, to make our own. They are not instructions. There's no leader to follow but you. We must make the system our own if it is to be an improvement on today's. And we have to want to do so, and understand fully why we want it. No pulling the wool over anyone's eyes. Intelligent consensus always, no 51% telling 49% what to do. That this is hard, untried, seems impossible, should deter us, not because the task is not enormously daunting, but because any other way will not work. At least, that's my reading of our predicament. Only if we grow up culturally and take charge of our communities via direct democracy, which must include a democratic money as well as other social infrastructure (such as Lego cars!) can encourage cooperation and the maturity of all citizens. Growing up out of the dumbed-down emotional immaturity we are now bogged down in is the task before us. Hoermann's ideas, and not all of them are here, seem very well tuned to the demands of that task.

One last thing, Hoermann & Co will be releasing a 30 page booklet at the end of the summer which will list practical advice for how to survive currency collapse. I'll get it, and translate as much of it as I can. (And I haven't had a chance to do any quality control, nor for last week's post. Sorry. Must do better!)

Hoermann's Ideas for a Possible Way Forward

2011-06-13T04:10:00.000-07:00

On to solutions then. Today I'm drawing from an interview Prof. Hoermann gave for WienTV late April this year, rather than pulling together the best parts of multiple sources. My domestic schedule has been absurdly hectic this past week or so, so anything more ambitious than a direct translation has to fall by the wayside. I don't think that's such a big deal, since the material in the almost 50 minute long interview is strong.

As background I'll just cover quickly the interview's opening 5 mins or so. Hoermann and other academics started in 2004-5 to attack the question of how to transition from the current, broken system to a very different one. Their first idea was to found a private university in which the students (the children of former east block oligarchs who had experienced systemic collapse) would have co-built and set it up. They would have been trained to become ambassadors and technicians of those ideas they themselves had co-developed. Their application was turned down twice. After much soul searching they decided to found an institute, for which the rules are not as stringent, but as they began the financial crisis began unraveling (it was summer 2007), and the rest, as they say, is history. Hoermann and his fellows are now following the tack of books, interviews and Internet presence generally in a spirit of 'We're all in this together.” He is at pains to point out, and does so again and again, even in his book, that what is put forward are suggestions to be experimented with in a spirit of open learning and not fixed instructions to be followed to the letter. And such has informed my translation. ;-)

“WienTV: How will the information flow from the system to the citizens and back? How will the system be able to detect and react to dissatisfaction and unhappiness?

Franz Hoermann: The system must function on at least two levels. The first is a formal level which is already integrated. Because we're setting up at least two accounting circuits, we'll be able to react to both individuals and groups who have, e.g., too little purchasing power, too little purchasing power in one or more of these circuits. Then, to put it prosaically, a red light would go on, whereupon one would first look into which need is not adequately being met, then consider which measures might be most appropriate in response, initially temporary solutions like changes in elements of the design, or find new roles for people, or look at rewards for work done, or whether special bonuses are due, or we rearrange or reconstruct, or we hide something for a period … you know? We'd simply improvise for a while, until we hit the solid solution from which generally appropriate responses can be established. And, besides the formal feedback for which the red lights have been built into the system, there'll also be real communications platforms where people can communicate informally, say things like, “Yeah, I'm coping with my job, no problem there, and I'm happy with my standard of living, but I'm bored!” or, “I don't have enough social contacts in my life.” Whatever bothers people, they can report in these forums, and then we'll try improve things accordingly. In the final analysis though, we have to get to a situation in which the people themselves can co-create and co-design the system.

But, we must of course point out that today such is highly unusual, since we're not really accustomed to, probably most can't even imagine a situation in which we shape our own money or economic system. Today we still believe that to do so requires a special education or qualification, or the experience of a successful businessman, or perhaps as banker or politician. But it won't be that way in our new concept. Creative people—and the best outcome would be if all could fully develop their own creativity—[must be drawn more deeply into designing social and economic processes.]

WTV: How will education work, be financed? Is education free?

FH: Of course. This is one of the key themes. We suggest, and these really are suggestions, that people have a [“Lebensbegleiter” is a new word so has no translation] 'coach for life,' a 'guide for life,' and it would be nice if this person were a member of the family, with experience. For this role there would be a host of courses and skills to be learned; psychology, coaching, mediation, all the things we have to day, and each can choose from this broad palette whatever first appeals. Lebensbegleiter would have to accompany 10 to 20 people or so, their whole lives, but of course only when their 'chemistry' works—you can choose you Begleiter, there are no fixed rules here, no centralization. 'Guides for life' would have the challenge of helping their charges fully develop their potential, exclusively via positive motivation, by trying to find out what sort of a person their charge is. This is the exact opposite of today's education system! Today's education system attempts to pull students through a set of supposedly objective standards—which is actually impossible for human potential, so these standards are in fact synthetic, synthesized—which, it is hoped, guarantee some minimum level of education. In our design it's completely different. We always develop individual paths, tailored to each individual, for which there is no 'correct' and 'incorrect,' and are primarily concerned with those things which make the individual happy, which, additionally perhaps, also achieve some positive social utility ... that would be the path he or she [follows]. At some point perhaps a person comes to a juncture where he or she decides to change direction, and they will be given every chance to do so, since it's best when people are multi-talented. […snip…]

Today's school system isn't there to ensure that all children develop optimally, rather, primarily, to ensure that teachers earn an income, in this crazy money system. The emphasis in teacher training is on expertise or technical knowledge, not on psychology, and not at all on the psychology of each individual student. One tries to instill in teachers how, roughly, to guess at their students' abilities, via scales and quantitative grading, which is absolutely impossible. [For example,] hundreds of experiments have shown, that the same lesson, taught by the same teacher, early in the morning or later in the afternoon, results in a difference of up to two grades. […snip…] [And rote learning really isn't learning at all.]

In our system, people are responsible for their life's development, and are accompanied throughout their journey by their 'life guide.' They can change direction at any time, for example take a year out to further develop body and mind, [financed by the guaranteed income].

WTV: How will your system cope with the problems thrown up by pleasant and unpleasant jobs, such as people not wanting to do the unpleasant work?

FH: We assume that, during the transition, there will be unpleasant jobs to be done. That's the way it is.

WTV: For example?

FH: For example physically strenuous work; working on a building site, or rubbish collection … although, there are people, or a certain percentage of people, who have no problem with such work. And if such work makes them happy, then of course they should do it. But, perhaps it would be best if we could arrange things such that they don't only do physically strenuous work. Perhaps they would only do such work two days of the week, then on other days occupy themselves with other things, things that could develop their mind, build social contacts with people who don't work the same type of job. Today we live our lives in boxes. We talk to people mostly from our area of expertise, and hardly ever with those from different careers. An academic and a builder rarely meet, say to play cards, or go to a restaurant or concert. That just doesn't happen today, and in my opinion that is a very damaging situation. Because, people who, let's say come from what we today call a 'higher' level, simply don't understand the lives of those with 'simpler' work. And, because they cannot understand their fellow humans, have prejudices which they then, for example, blindly bring into the political sphere. This is exacerbated by the fact that we today clearly overvalue academic, theoretical and political work. Extremely overvalued. I mean, when you consider how an academic degree—and I'm not talking about plagiarized or ghost-written degrees, although they of course exist, and perhaps very often—degrees don't really tell us much about the abilities of people who hold them, and certainly say nothing about their social abilities, their willingness to communicate and engage with other social groups, to learn of their successes and wishes. And that is a serious problem today which is exacerbated by a materialistic money system, a zero-sum game in which I have to take from people if I have to win something for myself.

WTV: How should one understand what happens when suddenly everyone wants to do the nice jobs, or even the horrible ones? Is there going to be some kind of capping?

FH: No. There are as few regulations as possible. This is something that people often misunderstand, especially if they've only heard a little of what we're proposing, or have a shallow understanding of it, and believe we putting forwarding some centralized, inflexibly model. No, we're proposing the exact opposite. The exact opposite. We would, should a majority of the people—otherwise this all just remains an idea—should a majority want to set this thing in motion, we would start with one particular variant, we're going to have to start somewhere, and then the process would develop in the community as wished and shaped by that community. And then we would withdraw to function increasingly as mere advisors. The idea is that people will have, right from the beginning of their social lives, a very different education, they begin from the earliest age with active roles in the community, in particular cooperative ventures which they experience as fulfilling and joyous, because these activities allow them to use their best abilities and talents, cooperatively, working with others. Then we'll have people who learn that pulling the wool over others' eyes, exploiting others, fooling them, which all happens at school today in the competition for good grades … And we even have the situation in some schools that there should be such a thing as a normal grade distribution. That is totally insane! Then there's no development, you see. To work to a predetermined normal grade distribution means that we negate positive development, that we don't admit or allow it. That is the most stupid thing we can do! For this reason, then, no more numerical [grade] assessments, we will deal with each child individually, encourage and nurture their unique abilities in a happy environment focused on joint endeavours aimed at generating the most creative ideas and solutions for society. And this [learning/work] will be rewarded with our 'thin-air' money, or 'performance-points' [generated directly by] social contribution, from which they then have real purchasing power.

In this way children will learn very early on that they themselves contribute to the society they live in, that their actions shape the world they live in. Then, when they're engaged with a difficult manual job or unpleasant task, perhaps because they want the reward it brings, it won't be the work itself that is the focus of their attention, but rather finding the most creative way of accomplishing it, to automate themselves out of a job, so to speak. This is of course in high contrast to today's job world. Today a bricklayer can only lay bricks. He can't build a robot that lays bricks, even if somehow he knew how to, because then all other bricklayers would be after him for making them redundant.

WTV: How do you respond to the criticism that your plans require centralized planning, that there would be a small group of people in complete control?

FH: Well, yes, at the beginning there would indeed be a small group of people developing the software, perhaps another administering the server room, and so on. But really, when you think about it, we trust today small groups of people, like the fire brigade, or groups like the Red Cross, emergency doctors etc., and exactly in these areas we see people more concerned with the social consequences of their work than with personal gain. These are the types of people best qualified for such work. And of course the whole thing is democratically organized, no question about it. There won't be some small party or private business exerting control, extorting society with their advanced specialized knowledge. That would be totally counterproductive, it simply can't be set up that way. And then, when the system has developed a certain rhythm, has found its stride, maybe after a few years, then the community would decide who does what when. This requires us to develop collective intelligence, with which people can fulfill and assign these key tasks responsibly and purposefully, and not selfishly.

[…snip…]

WTV: What will people who have a lot, i.e. the very wealthy, do with their wealth? You said in your last interview they would be invited to give away their riches. What do you mean?

FH: Not that they should give away all their belongings, that's not what I meant. What I meant was when a person no longer has faith in today's currencies, that is money, not property as such, that he or she should try to spend that money into the real economy, and that which can't be spent, that should be given away somehow, at least while we have the time-buffer between now and total collapse of world currencies. But, this change [to the new] will create, for the very rich, considerable psychological stress. And here we have to point out that everything they bring into the new system, say money, will be credited, at some exchange rate, as 'points' to their accounts. Nothing disappears, but the 'money' will not earn interest. If they leave it alone, it would just sit there and not grow. Probably the 'value' of these 'points' will stay more constant than today's money, which suffers from inflation, since the new system would operate along very different lines than today's [market driven] supply and demand; namely, as steered by the intelligence of the network's participants. For example, those who manufacture some product, and those who represent demand for it, its consumers, would cooperate in the network, and out of this general cooperation a price would arise, with which this product would … today one says “brought to market” --- reach the end user. For each product then a unique delivery solution. For example, for some mass-produced item that everyone needs, there might be some fixed delivery process, with a new product we have no experience of, we'd begin with a distribution mechanism designed to allow a consensus to develop, and then alter the distribution accordingly.

This is really critical point. Today's economists apply [market-based] supply and demand 'laws' universally, regardless of whether we're distributing necessities like rice, or some luxury good like a gentleman's wrist watch. And just on this one point alone we can see how economists have no clue about reality. There must be different distribution procedures for necessities and luxuries.

WTV: Yeah, I guess so!

FH: Exactly. Logically speaking, and looking at it humanely, we would have it that way already. But, sadly, this humane perspective is not deeply embedded in our system.”

The rest is a discussion of the coming currency collapse, which Hoermann is predicting, according to his latest interview, beginning July-August of this year.

I will continue with more on the solution side of things next week, time permitting! I'll close though with a passage in which Hoermann details the alternative to 'money as wealth':

“And this is why the notion that money has value is so dangerous and counterproductive. If it is a measure, then it can only be the abstraction of the value of some economic process, that is, the creation of a good or a service. But then it can't be a thing that we pass around, that has some changing value we fight over because it can be kept scarce. And this is the absolute, central core of our non-materialistic money system, in which money only appears then, when some social contribution has been realized. Ours is a performance-backed money, one which would have enormous advantages, since it would only be about documenting genuine social contribution in the real economy. For such “bonus points” with purchasing power will be given.”

(I've been at this for over 5 hours now, and have much else to do here at home, so I'm posting it without editing. I'll do that tomorrow. Apologies for any mistakes that have crept through!)